Court Opinion

ID: 9631296
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 10:33:45.162114+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:07:51.825002
License: Public Domain

Dissenting Opinion by
Mb. Justice Musmanno:
The plaintiff in this case, an employe of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company as a redcap porter for 22 years, was travelling as a passenger on a train of the defendant company on October 6, 1948, from Pittsburgh to Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, when, obviously through no fault of his own, the train ploughed info 85 tons of rock which had fallen from a cliff skirting the track over which the train proceeded, and, as a result of the collision, several people were killed and many injured.
*344The plaintiff sued the railroad company for the injuries sustained by him, averring negligence in the maintenance of the right of way. The jury found that the defendant was negligent and returned a verdict for the plaintiff in the sum of $2,000. The defendant moved for judgment notwithstanding the verdict before the trial judge and two other judges, and the motion was refused. The defendant then appealed to the Superior Court and renewed its argument for judgment n.o.v., and the Superior Court affirmed the judgment of the lower court. The railroad company now appeals to this Court to reverse the Superior Court, the court en banc and the jury on the theory that the plaintiff failed to prove negligence on the part of the defendant.
I need not belabor the elemental rule that, in considering the defendant’s appeal, in view of the verdict in the court below, we are required to read the testimony in the light most advantageous to the plaintiff and he must be given the benefit of every fact and inference of fact fairly deducible from the evidence. (McCracken v. Curwensville Borough, 309 Pa. 98.)
The facts are readily observable from the Majority Opinion. For a long time prior to the accident, loose rocks a foot in diameter were seen lying in the ditch alongside the railroad track over which the train carrying the plaintiff travelled. Cracks were observed in the wall of the cliff which was 85 feet high. It was testified that where rock is exposed over the years, the action of water, ice and alternate freezing and thawing causes the rock to. crack and split with- the result that portions break away .and .fall. . Not only did the hillside., involved in this .accident, approach the track as closely as 6 feet, but at one point a huge rock- (which fell at the .time .of -the accident.) projected out with such prominence that at times men gathered beneath *345the overhang to eat their lunch. Added to this evidence there was the testimony of an expert witness who categorically stated that the accident would not have occurred if the railroad company had taken the necessary precautionary measures.
The jury could have inferred, and undoubtedly did infer, that when the railroad company’s employes saw the rocks alongside the tracks, observed the cracks in the hillside wall, and knew that erosion, weather and spring water would loosen the rock, it should have taken such reasonable precautions as would have avoided the dreadful accident which was foreseeable. Nature’s handwriting on the wall of the cliff overlooking the Pennsylvania Eailroad track offered warning of impending disaster as dramatically and prophetically as the historical handwriting on the wall announced to Belshazzar the warning of catastrophe to his kingdom.
The railroad company could have avoided the accident of October 6, 1948 in many ways. It could have scaled down the overhanging and pendent rocks, widened the passage alongside the cliff, erected slide fences which would have warned approaching trains of an incipient slide, moved the track further away from the hillside or it could have built a revetment which would have imprisoned the loose rock behind concrete. It is no defense to say that building a revetment wall would have entailed expense. It costs money to build bridges, culverts and signal systems of safety. Those expenditures all go into the cost of maintaining a railroad. Money is needed to dig tunnels and to support the roofs of those tunnels. Could it he argued against a tunnel cavein due' to faulty support that it would cost too much to hold up "the ceiling? ' No railroad has the right to build its" tracks "in such a manner and over such , a route that it kills people and yet escapé ré*346sponsibility on the theory that it would cost too much to erect the necessary barriers of safety. As lightly as human life is sometimes regarded in the economic and military wars of the age, it has not dropped to so cheap a level that it can be compared in value to the cost of a few mixersful of cement. A railroad has no more right to run its train by a cliff which threatens a rock bombardment than it has to run it by an artillery target range firing cannon projectiles across its tracks.
The Majority Opinion states that there was no evidence that any slide of this magnitude had ever occurred before. The plaintiff was not required to prove that there had been a previous landslide any more than he was required to ride the cowcatcher of the engine to test the track, or to make inquiry of passersby as to the condition of the hillside. All that can be expected of a passenger who has been injured and who certainly had the right to assume that every reasonable precaution had been taken to avoid injuring him, is that he prove the circumstances enclosed within the orbit of the accident and then let the law determine the responsibility. This the plaintiff has done, and on those circumstances a jury has declared the defendant company negligent.
There is scarcely a situation where a human being can be in a more helpless situation to protect himself from the negligence of others than when he is being transported in a public conveyance. It is for that reason that a railroad (as well, as other public conveyors) owes the highest degree of care to its passengers. A railroad passenger is in effect an imprisoned hostage as he is being carried in a stéel train in whose management or direction he has no voice, over a track he does not see and oyer a terrain which, so far as his jurisdiction is concerned, could be a foreign country. What more could the plaintiff do than he has done in this case?
*347The Majority Opinion states that the plaintiff’s ease affirmatively proved that there was no previous slide of any hind. And in substantiation of this utterance the Opinion quotes from Witness Braun’s testimony as follows: “Q. If every foot of this particular hillside were inspected closely and showed no signs of a rock fall and no rock fall had ever occurred at that spot, would you still say that was the spot to build a revetment wall? A. No, I wouldn’t. I would say it depends on the reports of those inspections.” I fail to see how this proves that there had not been a slide of any hind before. The question of the defendant’s attorney began with an IF, and he never did show that “every foot of this particular hillside” had been inspected closely.
In point of fact the record shows conclusively that there had been previous slides. Assuredly the plaintiff is entitled to the inference that the rocks in the ditches alongside the tracks slid down from the hillside. He was not required to prove that the loose rocks did not grow in the ditches!
Furthermore, one of the railroad employes, a track foreman, testified that rocks were “falling down from the top of the hill.” He also testified to the presence of a spring 200 feet west of the point of the slide and that rocks were “washed out of the clay formation on the extreme top of the hill and had rolled down.”
McCarthy v. Ference, 358 Pa. 485, 58 A. 2d 49, is, in my opinion, absolute authority for the sustaining of the verdict in this case. The Majority Opinion, in attempting to distinguish that case from the one at bar, declares that here the plaintiff “proved no warnings to the defendant.” There can be no more direct and effective warnings than Nature’s warnings. The person who ignores a lowering and darkening sky, flashes of lightning, gusts of wind and growlings of *348thunder cannot reasonably complain about a drenching if he has not sought shelter from the storm whose approach has been heralded in every grain of dust and bending blade of grass. To demand of this plaintiff anything more than he presented to establish notice to the defendant of the impending fall of rock is to demand what reason does not ask, what the law does not expect and what justice can only regard as unfair.
While one should not wait for a star of precedent to which to hitch one’s wagon of judicial responsibility, provided his own appraisement of the facts and the law impel him to but one conclusion, it is always comforting and reassuring to know that somewhere and at some other time someone else, with an equal responsibility, has come to a conclusion similar to the one which has taken up an insistent abode in our being and in our own reasoning processes. In the case of Gleeson v. Virginia Midland Ry. Co., decided in 1891, (11 Supreme Ct. Reporter, 859, 35 Law Edition 458), a postal railway clerk was injured when the train on which he was a passenger struck a landslide and was wrecked. Justice Lamak, writing the opinion for the Supreme Court of the United States, said: “Just as surely as the laws of gravity will cause a heavy train to fall through a defective or rotten bridge to the destruction of life, just so surely will those same laws cause land-slides and consequent dangerous obstructions to the track itself from ill-constructed railway cuts. To all intents and purposes a railroad track which runs through a cut where the banks are so near and so steep that the usual laws of gravity will bring upon the track the debris created by the common processes of nature is overhung by those banks. Ordinary skill would enable the engineers to foresee the result, and ordinary prudence should lead the company to guard against it. To hold any other view would be to over-balance the priceless *349lives of the traveling public by a mere item of increased expense in the construction of railroads; and after all, an item, in the great number of cases, of no greater moment.” (Italics supplied)
And with that quotation from the opinion of one of the distinguished jurists in the history of the courts of our country I rest my dissent.