James Lee Clark v. Atlantic Coast Line Railroad Company

WISDOM, Circuit Judge.

On the afternoon of April 29, 1955, on the outskirts of Quitman, Georgia, James Lee Clark, twenty-two months old, was sitting in the middle of the railroad track on Atlantic Coast Line’s main line. His parents were nearby digging for fishing worms in a ditch paralleling the tracks. The weather was clear. The sun was shining. A long freight train — three diesel units and eighty-eight cars — arrived in Quitman at about three o’clock in the afternoon, traveling. at an estimated speed of thirty-five miles an hour. When the train was about a thousand feet away from the child,…