Bash v. Baltimore & O. R.

CLARK, Circuit Judge.

This appeal presents the pathetic pattern of the grade crossing accident. A family’s breadwinner going about his daily work (in this instance trucking coal) is snuffed out by the operation of a transportation system essential to his welfare (it carried the coal) and that of his fellow citizens. More than forty years ago, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court formulated the problem in these rather graphic phrases:

“The traveler on the public road, going at the rate of four or five miles an hour, cannot be seriously inconvenienced by the delay of a few seconds near the crossing.…