Summers v. Bloomsburg & Sullivan Railroad

Citations

• 24 Pa. Super. 615
• 1904 Pa. Super. LEXIS 245

Syllabus

<p>Negligence — Railroads—Grade crossing — “ Stop, look and listen ” — Contributory negligence.</p> <p>In an action against a railroad company to recover damages for personal injuries to plaintiff and for the killing of a mule, it appeared that the accident occurred in the night time at a point where a public highway obliquely intersected defendant’s tracks. The crossing was a dangerous one, inasmuch as trains from the northeast approached it by a curve emerging from behind a high cliff of almost perpendicular rocks on the south side of the track. A creek was to the northward. There was a whistle post about 1,098 feet northeast of the crossing. The track ran in a southwesterly direction from the whistle post along the bank of the creek to a point near the crossing when it curved sharply to the south, passed through a short deep cut in the rocks, and almost immediately onto the crossing. A person standing in the middle of the crossing could only see along the track northeastwardly 200 feet. Plaintiff testified that he stopped, looked and listened for approaching trains, at a point where he, standing up in his wagon was thirty feet from the crossing, which would put the pair of mules which he was driving considerably nearer the track, that he heard no sound of whistle, bell or other warning of an approaching train, that it was dark and he could only see the track in the direction from which the train afterwards came for the length of a rail and a half, that he then walked his team to the crossing and just as the front feet of the team were upon the track he saw the headlight of a locomotive coming around the curve to the eastward, that he attempted to back his team off the track, succeeded in getting the mule which had been on the side from which the train was coming'clear of the track but the locomotive struck the end of the tongue, knocked down and injured the other mule so that he had to be killed, and caused personal injuries to plaintiff. Plaintiff’s testimony th