A CARRIER IS LIABLE FOR ANY LOSS CAUSED BY HIS DELAY IN DELIVERING GOODS.
Question.—Inform us what recourse we would have against a railroad for a shipment of lumber from Buffalo to New York, which has already been on the road eighteen days, as shown by the shipping documents, and has not arrived yet. In the meantime the market dropped some 10 per cent. in price. This lumber was bought f. o. b. Buffalo.
Reply: A carrier is bound, not only to deliver the lumber entrusted to him for carriage, but to deliver it with reasonable promptness. The courts recognize the fact that promptness of delivery has an importance second only to the fact of delivery itself. What is to be held as constituting reasonably prompt delivery is to be decided in accordance with nature of the goods and all the circumstances of the particular case; it is such delivery as carriers of the kind in question, carriers by rail or vessel, as the case may be, ordinarily make in handling goods of the same kind as those in question. When the time arrives for delivery to be made, under this rule, and the goods are not delivered the consignee is entitled to sue for their value at destination on the day on which delivery ought to have been made. If the carrier is able to deliver the goods, and offers to do so, at any time before he has been required to pay for them as goods lost, the consignee cannot refuse to accept them and still recover their full value. He is bound to accept the goods whenever they are tendered, no matter how great the delay may have been; but in such a case he still has a valid claim for any loss he may have sustained as a result of the delay. His damages are at least as great as that amount by which the market value of the goods on the day of delivery is below their market value on the day on which delivery ought to have been made; to this is to be added any other loss or expense brought upon him as a direct result of the carrier’s delay.
Opinion No. 13.