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Civil Procedure Keyed to Field
Cruzan v. New York Central and Hudson River Railroad Co
Citation:
227 Mass. 594, 116 N.E. 879 (1917)Facts
Leon L. Cruzan was working as a head-end brakeman on a freight train approximately twelve hundred feet long on the defendant’s main eastbound track. The train was ordered to back onto a siding at Brookfield to allow a faster train to pass. Cruzan’s duties included signaling the engineer to back up, then descending from the car to set the switch after the train passed onto the siding. As the freight train backed at five to six miles per hour, Cruzan descended a ladder on the northerly side of the fourth car from the locomotive, facing rearward and not looking in the direction from which a passenger express train was approaching on the parallel northerly track at sixty miles per hour. While in a stooping position on the stirrup, about to jump to the ground, he was struck by the express train’s locomotive and fatally injured. The defendant had rules warning employees that trains may run on any track in either direction without notice and requiring employees to exercise proper care. The track was substantially straight with clear visibility for twelve hundred feet.
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