Yazoo & Mississippi Valley Railroad v. Metcalf

Citations

• 84 Miss. 242

Syllabus

<p>1. Railroads. Code 1892, § 3549. Bacldng train. Passenger depot.</p> <p>Code 1892, $ 3549, regulating the backing of trains near passenger depots:</p> <p>(a) Is not restricted in its application to any particular class of persons;</p> <p>(b) Is a regulation intended to preserve and protect human life and limb, and should be given full scope in accordance with its plain meaning and not restricted by strained interpretation; and</p> <p>(c) Affords protection to all persons injured by a backing train within three hundred feet of a passenger depot; the phrase “within fifty feet thereof” refers to the distance from the depot to the nearest point of the track on which the train is backing.</p> <p>2. Same. Walking between tracks. Gross negligence. Licensee.</p> <p>Where a railroad company permitted and impliedly consented to the use by the public generally of a path between two of its tracks near a passenger depot, and the plaintiff, thoroughly familiar with the surroundings, while using the path on a dark night was injured, within three hundred feet of the depot, by a rod negligently permitted to protrude from an engine backing into the depot, the plaintiff’s use of the path was not, as a matter <of law, such gross negligence as to take the case without the statute.</p>