McDonald v. Consolidated Rail Corp.

On August 14,1978, the sixteen year old plaintiff, while traveling by bus from Vermont to Maryland, encountered a thirty-minute layover in Springfield, Massachusetts. During that delay, he left the bus station and wandered onto a nearby railroad trestle owned by the defendant. While he was on the trestle, a Conrail freight train moving at six to eight miles an hour approached him. The operator of the train (the conductor) first saw the plaintiff from a distance of 1,250 feet. The train could have been stopped within a space of 150 feet. The plaintiff waved to the conductor, and, when the…