Rudolph v. Pennsylvania Schuylkill Valley Railroad

Citations

• 186 Pa. 541
• 40 A. 1083
• 1898 Pa. LEXIS 1040

Syllabus

<p>Eminent domain — Assessment of damages — Itailroads.</p> <p>In order that two properties having no physical connection may be regarded as one in the assessment of damages for right of way, they must be so inseparably connected in the use for which they are applied, as that the injury and destruction of one must necessarily and permanently injure the other.</p> <p>In proceedings against a railroad to recover damages for land condemned, it appeared that the owner had bought the tract through which the right of way was taken for the purpose of manufacturing paper.</p> <p>There was a stream of pure water on the land, and the owner built thereon a reservoir and a paper mill. Several years before the proceedings were begun another railroad company had appropriated a right of way through the tract, and long afterwards plaintiff conveyed to the same company a strip adjoining this right of way for railroad purposes. The mill was on one side of this right of way, and the stream and reservoir on the other.</p> <p>It appeared that the paper mill could not have been operated without the stream and reservoir. Held, that the water and the land constituted an indispensable appurtenance of the mill, and made the whole one property, and that the mere right of way and conveyance could not destroy its identity as one properly.</p> <p>Where a railroad company condemns a right of way through a tract of land and liles a bond, but subsequently abandons this location and takes another through the same tract, consequential injuries from the construction and operation of the road may be considered in estimating the market value at the time the bond was filed.</p> <p>In condemnation proceedings the railroad company claimed that the owner of the land had been compensated for the pollution of a stream by another railroad company which had some years before located its railroad through the same tract. There was evidence that the company which had first located its road used anthracite coal whi