47 Pa. Super. 639 | Pa. Super. Ct. | 1911
Opinion by
The plaintiff brought this action in assumpsit to recover for a lot of secondhand household goods alleged to have been lost during the course of transportation over the line of the defendant. The plaintiff recovered a judgment in the court below and defendant appeals.
There is no necessity for inquiring whether the Portland Van & Storage Co. and the Trans-Continental Freight Co. were liable to this plaintiff as common carriers of the packages in question. An initial carrier may, so far as the carrier which completes the transportation is concerned, become a forwarder and agent of the shipper. The receipt which the Portland Van & Storage Co. gave to the plaintiff for the packages provided that they should be “forwarded in a collective carload of household goods to Trans-Continental Freight Co., at 355 Dearborn St., Chicago, Ill., which is the point of distribution of said carload, and to be thereafter shipped or delivered to ... . at ... . which is the final destination of this lot.” The blanks indicating the point to which the goods were to be shipped from Chicago were not filled out, but the concluding part of the receipt states the freight rate through to Philadelphia, where the freight was to be paid for the carriage over the whole route, thus indicating that the ultimate destination of the shipment was to be Philadelphia. This clearly indicated that the entire transpor
The burden was upon the plaintiff to prove, in order to recover of the defendant the value of the goods which she alleged had been lost, that the goods had come into possession of the defendant, She could not discharge
The judgment is reversed and the record is remitted to the court below with directions to enter judgment in favor of the defendant non obstante veredicto.
Henderson and Head, JJ., dissent.