Taylor v. Erie City Passenger Railway Co.

Citations

• 37 Pa. Super. 292
• 1908 Pa. Super. LEXIS 280

Syllabus

<p>Street railways — Consent of owner — License as to switches — New needs of the public — Exhaustion of license.</p> <p>Where an owner of land abutting on a road consents to the occupation of the road by a street railway, and licenses the company “to occupy and extend their line of railway with the necessary turnouts and operate the same along said road,” the company does not exhaust its license by building a switch 253 feet long, but may subsequently extend the same to a length of 360 feet, if it appears that such extension is not unreasonable under the circumstances and is demanded by the growth of the community.</p> <p>The state in creating a corporation such as a street railway company contemplates that the development of the physical property by such corporation, of the means and appliances by which it works out the objects for which it is created, will keep pace with the growth of the community, and the ever-increasing demands of the people it is to serve. So long as such a corporation confines itself within the boundary delimited in its charter, and usurps no power withheld by the state or granted to others, it cannot be said to have exhausted its own powers of development because the facilities first adopted or constructed and then sufficient, turned out, later on, to be inadequate to enable it to respond to the demands of a growing section of the country.</p> <p>Where a landowner licenses a street railway to “occupy and extend their line of railway with the necessary turnouts and operate the same along ” a road named, the license after the construction of the railway becomes irrevocable.</p>