Brian v. Oregon Short Line Railroad

105 P. 489, 40 Mont. 109, 1909 Mont. LEXIS 149
CourtMontana Supreme Court
DecidedDecember 6, 1909
DocketNo. 2,718
StatusPublished
Cited by7 cases

This text of 105 P. 489 (Brian v. Oregon Short Line Railroad) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Montana Supreme Court primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Brian v. Oregon Short Line Railroad, 105 P. 489, 40 Mont. 109, 1909 Mont. LEXIS 149 (Mo. 1909).

Opinion

MR. JUSTICE HOLLOWAY

delivered the opinion of the court.

The plaintiff, a minor, through his guardian ad litem brought this action to recover damages, and in his complaint alleges that he on October 5, 1907, having bought a ticket which entitled him to ride on defendant’s cars from Salt Lake City to Butte, entered one of the defendant’s passenger-cars at Salt Lake City, and defendant then and there agreed to carry him as a passenger to Butte; that he was carried from Salt Lake City to Ogden, but at Ogden the defendant, acting through its agents and servants, by threats and menaces expelled him from its car; that he was among strangers without money, and suffered from cold and hunger, and, in addition thereto, was injured in his feelings, all to his damage in the sum of $2,000. The answer denies generally and specifically every one of the foregoing allegations. The jury returned a verdict in favor of the plaintiff for $750, and from the judgment entered thereon, and from an order denying it a new trial, the defendant appealed.

While there are some contradictions in the evidence, we think these facts appear: On August 12, 1907, Henry Mulholland paid to J. G. Nash, who was city ticket agent for the Great Northern Railway Company at Butte, and apparently a local agent for that steamship company known as the White Star Line, the sum of $76.25 to purchase steamship and rail transportation for the plaintiff from Liverpool to Butte. ' Later the plaintiff took passage at Liverpool, and on September 28 landed in New York City. On the same day he secured from the Erie road a third-class limited coupon ticket to Butte, which routed him over the Erie road from New York to Chicago over the Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific from Chicago to Denver, over the Colorado Midland from Denver to Grand Junction, over the Rio Grande Western from Grand Junction to Ogden, and over the Oregon Short Line from Ogden to Butte. The ticket contains several stipulations, one for a continuous passage, and another that the ticket would not be accepted for [113]*113passage unless used to destination before midnight of October 4, 1907. The plaintiff left New York on September 29, was delayed four hours in Chicago, eighteen hours in Denver, and the train which carried him into Ogden was three hours late. He arrived in Ogden about 6 o’clock on the morning of October 5, and, when he presented himself for passage on the first Oregon Short Line train bound for Butte on the afternoon of that day, he was refused carriage on his ticket because it had expired. The body of the tickets, above the attached coupons, contains the terms and conditions of the contract, and bears a signature purporting to be that of the plaintiff. During the course of his examination plaintiff was asked by his counsel whether he signed the ticket, and, over the objection of defendant, answered that he did not. The ruling was erroneous. It was wholly immaterial whether he signed it or not. The ticket is in form and in fact a special contract for passage. The plaintiff accepted it, acted upon it, and received his transportation to Ogden by virtue of it, and by so doing he assented to all its terms and conditions as fully as if he had read and signed it. (Hanlon v. Illinois Cent. R. Co., 109 Iowa, 136, 80 N. W. 223; Quimby v. Boston & M. R. Co., 150 Mass. 365, 23 N. E. 205, 5 L. R. A. 846; Fonseca v. Cunard Steamship Co., 153 Mass. 553, 25 Am. St. Rep. 660, 27 N. E. 665, 12 L. R. A. 340; 2 Hutchinson on Carriers, see. 1028, and cases cited.)

In excluding the defendant’s offer to prove that the ticket was sold at a reduced price the error committed was harmless in this particular instance, considering the particular character of the ticket involved. The plaintiff was not in a position to demand any kind of ticket he might have desired. He was not purchasing his transportation; on the contrary, it had been purchased for him, and, in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, his acceptance of this ticket was at least prima facie evidence that he received precisely the kind and character of ticket for which payment had been made. That a common carrier may issue such a ticket as the one before us is too well settled to be now open to question.

[114]*114Defendant offered to prove that the Erie agent who supplied plaintiff with this ticket was also the agent of an association known as the Immigrant Clearing-house, and that this defendant company was not one of the associated roads The offer was refused, and properly so. If the Erie road was to any extent the agent of the Oregon Short Line in selling this ticket, the offered evidence was clearly immaterial. This brings us to a consideration of the important questions presented by this appeal.

1. In furnishing this ticket, was the selling company the agent of the Oregon Short Line? The ticket on its face declares that in selling it the Erie road acted only as agent and would not be responsible beyond its own line. The evidence shows that similar tickets, issued by the same company, over the same lines—which tickets had not expired—had been accepted by this defendant company. We are inclined to think that this of itself was sufficient to show the agency. (Spencer v. Lovejoy, 96 Ga. 657, 51 Am. St. Rep. 152, 23 S. E. 836.) But, furthermore, when this ticket ivas examined by the conductor of the defendant company, at Ogden on October 5, his only objection to it was that it had expired. In Nichols v. Southern Pac. Co., 23 Or. 123, 37 Am. St. Rep. 664, 31 Pac. 296, 18 L. R. A. 55, the court said: “He [the conductor] was charged with the duty and clothed with the authority of passing upon the validity of tickets issued like the one in question. When he demanded the ticket, it was for the purpose of inspecting it, and ascertaining whether the plaintiff had the right to ride upon it. He was required in the discharge of his duties to accept or reject it; and when he assigned as his only reason for rejecting it, and refusing to allow the plaintiff to ride upon it, that he was not the original purchaser, the defendant ought to be bound by that determination, and the implication arising from it, that the ticket was authorized originally and genuine.” We agree with this declaration of the Oregon court. Any other rule would impose upon the traveling public an intolerable burden. It is a matter of , common [115]*115knowledge that in this country we do not have a strictly transcontinental line of railroad operated by one company; and yet a traveler may procure a ticket in Seattle good for passage to Portland, Maine. Necessarily he will have to travel over several different lines of road, and it would be impossible, or at least impracticable, for him to ascertain whether the selling road was the agent of each of the other roads over which he would be required to make his journey; and it would be an intolerable imposition upon him to require him, after having paid for his through passage, to undertake it at the peril of being refused passage by every road other than the one from which the ticket was purchased.

2. By agreeing to the provision in the ticket, “Good for one continuous passage,” the plaintiff merely bound himself that once on any of the lines of road over which he was routed he would pursue his journey over that road continuously or without interruption. In other words, he agreed that he was not entitled to any stop-over privileges from any one of the lines of road. (4 Elliott on Railroads, see. 1596; 2 Hutchinson on Carriers, see. 1048.)

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Bluebook (online)
105 P. 489, 40 Mont. 109, 1909 Mont. LEXIS 149, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/brian-v-oregon-short-line-railroad-mont-1909.