Kelham v. CSX Transportation, Inc.

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Kelham, a railroad engineer, halted a mile-long freight train on a parallel track to enable a higher-priority train to pass. Another train, also ordered to wait on the parallel track, failed to stop at a signal and collided with Kelham’s train, causing Kelham’s locomotive to lurch forward slightly. Kelham testified that he had just begun to walk down the stairs to the locomotive’s bathroom and that the lurch caused him to fall down the stairs, injuring his back and aggravating a condition that he had called “spondylitic spondylolisthesis,” the forward slippage of a vertebra, which had previously been asymptomatic but afterward required surgery. The railroad’s experts testified that the “lurch” would have been slight and would not have caused a forward fall; the train conductor sitting with Kelham in the cab did not see him fall. For days after the accident Kelham told no one that he had fallen, nor did he have any visible injuries. The Seventh Circuit affirmed the jury’s rejection of Kelham’s claims under the Federal Employers’ Liability Act, 45 U.S.C. 51. The trial judge correctly rejected Kelham’s objections to admitting the evidence about his history of back problems and statements from the depositions of his doctors. It was not unreasonable for a jury to find that Kelham had fabricated the claim and that the railroad’s negligence had no causal relation to his injuries. View "Kelham v. CSX Transportation, Inc." on Justia Law