412
Opinion of the Court
Adopting Hiles' reading of § 2 would require us to hold that a misaligned drawbar, by itself, is a violation of the SAA, and we are quite unwilling to do that. It is true that our failure-to-perform cases made clear that the railroad will be liable for injuries caused by malfunctioning equipment, even when cars are equipped with automatic couplers. But we cannot agree that a misaligned drawbar is, as a matter of law, a malfunctioning drawbar. Historically, misaligned drawbars were an inevitable byproduct of the ability to traverse curved track and, like the closed knuckle in Affolder, are part of the normal course of railroad car operations.
We are understandably hesitant to adopt a reading of § 2 that would suggest that almost every railroad car in service for nearly a century has been in violation of the SAA. See United Transportation Union v. Lewis, 711 F. 2d 233, 251, n. 39 (CADC 1983). Our hesitance is augmented by the enforcement scheme Congress enacted with the SAA. From its beginning, § 6 of the SAA provided that railroads in violagress had any singular purpose in enacting § 2, it was to require the railroads to equip cars with uniformly compatible automatic couplers that employees could operate without having to go between the cars. See H. R. Rep. No. 1678, 52d Cong., 1st Sess., 3 (1892) ("It is the judgment of this committee that all cars and locomotives should be equipped with automatic couplers, obviating the necessity of the men going between the cars"); S. Rep. No. 1049, supra n. 8, at 6 (1892) ("What the railroad employés need to secure greater safety in the performance of their duties is uniformity. They want all couplers alike and perfectly interchangeable"). We think Congress fairly intended to prohibit the practice of placing railworkers between moving cars to guide a link into its matching coupler pocket or, worse, into an unfamiliar coupler cavity. Cf. Hearings on Automatic Couplers and Power Brakes before the House Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, 52d Cong., 1st Sess., 11 (1892) ("He goes in to make a coupling. He does not know the conditions that exist there. He can not tell whether it is a Janney or a Hinson, a Dowling, a Drexel, or some other kind of a drawbar"). Contrary to Hiles' assertion, the legislative history contains no suggestion that Congress intended to prevent an employee from going between cars to ensure that the knuckle is open, that the locking pin is set, see supra, at 405, or that the drawbar is aligned.
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