DocketNumber: No. 36320.
Citation Numbers: 29 So. 2d 255, 201 Miss. 442
Judges: <bold>McGehee, J.,</bold> delivered the opinion of the court.
Filed Date: 2/24/1947
Status: Precedential
Modified Date: 1/12/2023
It seems to me that this appeal is properly to be controlled by the following plain facts, which are either wholly undisputed or else are admitted by appellee: *Page 458
It is undisputed that the railroad track ran north and south and that the paved highway, 20 feet in width, ran east and west. It is undisputed that the railroad motor car, together with its trailer, was 18 feet in total length. It is admitted by the appellee that as the railroad motor car reached the crossing, it was traveling at the same rate of speed, ten to fifteen miles per hour, as that of the eastbound log truck approaching the crossing. It is undisputed that the log truck struck the trailer about its middle. Therefore, it follows that after the railroad motor car had reached the center of the highway, thereby blocking the south half of the highway on which half the log truck was traveling, the railroad motor car traveled thence northward all of its own length and half of the length of the trailer, or 13 1/2 feet, while the log truck was traveling a like distance of 13 1/2 feet in approaching the point where it collided with the middle of the trailer. The driver of the empty log truck admitted in his own testimony, and it is undisputed, that he could have stopped his truck in four or five feet, whence it further follows that the truck driver had ample time and opportunity after the crossing was blocked to stop without colliding with the trailer had he complied with the duty imposed by law upon him to look ahead.
When the railroad motor car, together with its trailer, arrived at and was upon the railroad crossing, it had the legal right to be there — upon its own track, as to which it then had priority and this regardless of any operative negligence of the railroad employee inter sese by which it came to be there. Its presence there was a fact completed and was a fact wholly independent of, and had no motivating connection or relation whatever with the approaching log truck, which in its approach was moving of its own completely independent force and direction. Hence the presence of the railroad motor car and trailer had set up merely a condition and was not an efficient cause as known to the law of negligence — a cause sine qua non, not the cause causans — if the log truck had the independent *Page 459 time and opportunity to avoid colliding with the trailer, as the testimony shows without dispute that it did so have.
In Mississippi Export R. Co. v. Summers,
And the court cited, with approval, St. Louis-San Francisco Ry. Co. v. Guthrie,
So here and to summarize the railroad motor car and trailer had occupied the crossing, thereby furnishing merely a condition, for a sufficient length for the driver of the log truck to avoid running into it, and when he ran into the trailer his negligence was the sole proximate cause of the collision and injury, thus entitling the railroad to the peremtory charge which it requested.