Riddle v. Williamson & Pond Creek Railroad
Riddle v. Williamson & Pond Creek Railroad
Opinion of the Court
Opinion of the Court by
Affirming.
. Tbe only question presented by tbis appeal is whether the Williamson & Pond Cre'ek Railroad Company, wbicb condemned a small strip of land belonging to Parlee Rid-, die, appropriated to its own use any land not appropriated by tbe commissioners and covered by the deed wbicb it received in the condemnation proceeding.
Tbe question arises in tbe following way: In tbe early part of tbe year 1912, tbe Railroad Company lo
In March, 1913, Parlee Riddle and her husband brought this suit in the Pike county court asking that the order confirming the commissioners’ report be set aside on the ground that the company’s engineers had fraudulently deceived plaintiffs as to the location of the outer boundary of the land condemned and had thus cheated plaintiffs out of a strip of land from 10 to 20 feet in width for which no compensation had been allowed. To this petition a demurrer was sustained and the petition dismissed. Plaintiffs then appealed to the Pike circuit court. Thereupon the railroad company filed an answer denying the' allegations of fraud. Depositions were taken and the case submitted. After the submission plaintiffs
The land condemned was accurately described by metes and bounds and embraced a small strip of land of varying width measured from the center line of the railroad as theretofore established and fixed by the map filed in the Pike county clerk’s office. W. G. W. Riddle testified that more land was taken than was condemned, lie was positive of this fact because the land condemned reached only to the inner edge of his potato patch, whereas the land taken extended beyond that point. W. K. Elliott, Ballard Blackburn and Lee Scott testified to. the same effect. Winter Scott and B. L. Murphy, who measured the land from the center of the track as built, testified that at the point where the deed called for a width of 120 feet, the stakes were placed at a distance of 129 feet and 6 inches, and that at a point where the, deed called for a width of 150 feet, the stake was placed at a distance of 160 feet and 3 inches. According to the evidence of the railroad engineers, the center line of the track as built was not the center line as fixed in the map. They not only measured the distances from the center line as originally established at the time the commissioners acted, but subsequently verified these measurements, and the land taken did not extend beyond the distances fixed in the deed when measured from the original center line.
As before stated,, the deed does not describe land of a certain width measured from the center of the track as built, but from the center line of the railroad as originally proposed and established. The evidence that the track was not constructed on the center line as originally established, but was built a few feet to the east of that line, is uncontradicted. It is therefore clear that the differences between the measurements made by Scott and Murphy and those made by the railroad engineers, grow
Judgment affirmed.
Case-law data current through December 31, 2025. Source: CourtListener bulk data.