Railway Accidents: Duties towards third parties

Third parties could suffer harm in two ways. First, they might be neighbours of the railway line and suffer harm when sparks escaped from the steam engines. (This is covered in the Technological Change case study.) Secondly, they might suffer if they were injured as passers-by by a train.

Spain provides examples where the victim had to prove fault.

In 1865, a neighbour’s property was damaged by fire caused by sparks escaping from a passing train. The Supreme Court decided that a neighbour had to prove that the engine driver was at fault for letting sparks escape, even though it was clear that the sparks had caused the fire.

In 1927, a cart was struck by a train on a level crossing and the people travelling on it were killed. Their relatives sued the company successfully because they were able to show that the company was at fault in breaching safety regulations. The level crossing keeper had been on strike for several days and the train was running late. The company was held responsible not only because its employee allowed the train to run outside of official hours, but because it should have also supplied somebody else to look after the level crossing chains that would have prevented the cart getting onto the tracks when the train was approaching.

But proving fault was difficult. Under paragraph 1 of article 1384 of the Civil Code, French law developed a principle under which a person was liable for the acts of things under his control. From 1897, this was interpreted as creating liability without the victim having to prove fault (as he would under article 1382). In 1919, the Cour de cassation decided that a railway company was liable where a steam engine exploded in a station breaking special glass windows in neighbouring property. Although the cause of the accident was unexplained, the company could not escape liability unless it could show that some external factor had been the cause of the explosion.