Cite as: 516 U. S. 400 (1996)
Opinion of the Court
that automatic couplers be present, but also that they actually perform. See, e. g., Affolder, supra, at 98; Carter, supra, at 433-434.
III
Hiles urges that railroads have an absolute duty to outfit their cars with safe equipment and that the SAA is violated if an employee is required to go between the ends of cars to manually adjust a misaligned drawbar. We cannot agree. Hiles correctly points out that failure to perform as required by the SAA is itself an actionable wrong dependent on neither negligence nor proof of a defect,12 see Affolder, supra, at 98-99; O'Donnell, supra, at 390, 393, but the absolute duty to which we have referred on numerous occasions is not breached as a matter of law when a drawbar becomes mis-aligned during the ordinary course of railroad operations.
In Affolder, the plaintiff was working with a crew coupling cars. The 25th and 26th cars failed to couple and, after a few more cars were added, the first 25 cars began rolling down a slight incline. The plaintiff ran after the runaway cars in an attempt to board and stop them, but instead fell under a car and lost his leg. At trial, the railroad attempted to prove that the coupler at issue was not defective and that the knuckle on the coupler was closed when the coupling attempt was made. Following O'Donnell, we reaffirmed that the failure of equipment to perform as required is sufficient to create SAA liability, Affolder, supra, at 99 (quoting O'Donnell, supra, at 390), but we noted that failure to couple would not create liability if the coupler was not properly set:
"Of course [imposition of failure-to-perform liability] assumes that the coupler was placed in a position to operate on impact. Thus, if 'the failure of these two cars to couple on impact was because the coupler on the Penn-12 Hiles neither pleaded nor attempted to prove at trial that Norfolk & Western acted negligently or that the drawbar was defective.
409
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