Kovacs v. Chesapeake & Ohio Railway Co.

Defendant appeals as of right from a jury verdict of $1.5 million in favor of plaintiff, reduced by one-third for the comparative negligence of plaintiff’s decedent. We affirm.

Facts

On September 30, 1976, plaintiff’s decedent was struck and killed by one of defendant’s trains as he sat in a rented dump truck straddling defendant’s railroad tracks. The decedent, 49-year-old Charles L. Kovacs, and John Hibbard, an employee of Copeland Construction Company, were repairing or deepening a ditch into which water drained from Kovacs’s property. The ditch ran alongside defendant’s railroad tracks. The…