Shirley v. Norfolk & Western Railway Co.

147 S.E. 705, 107 W. Va. 21, 66 A.L.R. 807, 1929 W. Va. LEXIS 34
West Virginia Supreme Court·Decided February 12, 1929·No. 6364·Published·Cited by 2 cases

Opinion

Lively, Judse:

This writ challenges a verdict for $20,000.00 and judgment entered thereon July 7, 1928. The parties will be herein designated as they were in the trial court as plaintiff and defendants, and not as plaintiffs in error and defendant in error. Plaintiff, a boy five years and twenty-five days old at the time of the accident, had his hand mashed by a railroad car or ears operated over a spur, or service track, necessitating amputation at the wrist. The gravamen of negligence charged in the declaration is that defendant permitted a sand pile to remain near its spur track at which plaintiff was playing, and that defendants in shifting the cars by the sand pile negligently and carelessly failed to keep a lookout for him in dangerous proximity to its track, and did not warn him of the approach of the cars, by reason whereof plaintiff was run over and against by said cars and injured. A photostatic copy of a map made from careful survey of the spur track and its immediate surroundings (scale fifty feet to the inch) will visualize the controversy. (See attached map.) The spur track is approximately 1500 feet long and extends from the main tracks a westerly course to the tipple of a coal company. At the sand pile and crossing and between them and the store on the east the track “swagged,” that is the grade was lower than at the tipple on the west and the store on the east. On the day of the accident eighteen loaded coal cars were standing in this “swag” just east of the sand pile and west of the store. The sand pile proper was on the coal company’s land where it unloaded a car of sand each month for use in its mining operations, but

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Shirley v. Norfolk & Western Railway Co., 147 S.E. 705, 107 W. Va. 21, 66 A.L.R. 807, 1929 W. Va. LEXIS 34 (W. Va. 1929).

147 S.E. 705 (Shirley v. Norfolk & Western Railway Co.) — published by Counsel Stack Legal Research, free access to 12M+ legal documents.

Related

Hensley v. Braden
91 S.W.2d 34 (Court of Appeals of Kentucky (pre-1976), 1935)
Shirley v. Norfolk & Western Railway Co.
152 S.E. 316 (West Virginia Supreme Court, 1930)