144 Ga. 453 | Ga. | 1915
W. A. Tapley, by his next friend, brought suit against the Georgia and Florida Railway Company, to recover damages for a personal injury. A verdict was rendered in his favor for $500. The defendant moved for a new trial, which was refused, and it excepted.
Efforts to lay down a comprehensive definition of the word “passenger,” or, in a single statement, to exhaust all possible circumstances under which the relation of carrier and passenger may exist, have not proved very successful. The varying facts under which that relation may begin, continue, and terminate, render such a complete definition, applicable to all cases, difficult if not impossible. It is easy to declare that where one has purchased a
In Western & Atlantic R. Co. v. Voils, 98 Ga. 446 (26 S. E. 483, 35 L. R. A. 655), it was held that when a person goes to a railway-station where there is no ticket-office, but where it is customary for trains to stop when signaled in order to take on persons desiring to take passage, and by giving proper signals signifies his intention to become a passenger, and the train is stopped for the purpose of taking him on, he is, when attempting to take the train, a passenger, and is entitled to all the rights of a passenger, although he has not purchased a ticket. A mere intention on the part of a person to become a passenger, without regard to any act on the part of the company, does not, ipso facto, constitute him such a passenger. Neither does the mere giving of a signal at a flag-station make a person giving the signal a passenger on an approaching train.
The street-railway and omnibus cases are not in all respects analogous to those involving an effort to take passage on a steam-railway train at a flag-station. One difference which will be readily perceived arises from the fact that street-cars and omnibuses travel along highways which they do not own and over which other vehicles and pedestrians pass, while steam railways use a right of way along a fixed road-bed, and in many places have waiting-rooms at fixed places for the reception of passengers. Also street-cars and omnibuses usually stop either whenever signaled, or at certain short intervals upon signals, and passengers generally enter these conveyances in the public streets or at street-crossings. Nevertheless the reasoning in cases involving the question of whether a person has become a passenger upon such a vehicle may be useful in considering the same question with reference to whether one has become a passenger on a steam-railway train at a flag-station. See, in this connection: 4 Ruling Cases, 1003, § 471; Chicago Traction Co. v. O’Bryan, 219 Ill. 303 (76 N. E. 341); Webster v. Fitchburg R. Co., 161 Mass. 298 (37 N. E. 165, 24 L. R. A. 521);
From the foregoing discussion, it is evident that the trial court erred in instructing the jury to the effect that one who goes to a flag-station, and signals a passenger-train, thereby, without more, becomes a passenger.
Judgment reversed.