Requiring universal inter-coupling between all cars would have created a coupler monopoly

Evidence

Nor is the reason for their amission to do so far to seek or difficult to perceive. There are several kinds or makes of practical and efficient automatic couplers. Some railroad companies use one kind; others have adopted other kinds. Couplers of each kind will couple automatically with others of the same kind or coistruction. Railroad companies engaged in interstate commerce are required to haul over their roads car equipped with all these couplers. They cannot relieve themselves from this obligation or renounce this public duty for the simple reason that their cars or locomotives are not equipped with automatic couplers which will couple with those with which the cars of other roads are yrovidedY and which will couple with eauel facility with those of their kind. These facts and this situation were patent to the congress when it enacted this statute. It must have known the impracticability of providing every car with as many different couplers as it might meet upon a gr. at system of railroads, and it made no such requirement. It doubtless knew the monopoly it would create by requiring every railroad company to use the same coupler, and it did not create this monopoly. — Henry M. Hart, Jr. and Albert M. Sacks, The Legal Process, 1007

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader antitrust thread already running through this volume’s FTC chapters — the monopoly rationale for a safety statute’s limited scope. — connects to: The five-year phase-in shows Congress contemplated a substantial equipment change — Henry M. Hart, Jr. and Albert M. Sacks, The Legal Process: Basic Problems in…, 1038; Railroad workers faced battlefield rates of death from dangerous car coupling — Henry M. Hart, Jr. and Albert M. Sacks, The Legal Process: Basic Problems in…, 1145