Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, March 4, 1995                   TAG: 9503060042
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: C-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: LAURENCE HAMMACK STAFF WRITER
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

HIGH COURT FAVORS NS; $500,000 VERDICT OUT

Joseph Stover had claimed during a 1993 trial that he suffered a disabling neck injury while pulling a lever on a ``derail,'' a track device used to prevent boxcars from entering a main line from a side track.

Stover claimed that Norfolk Southern Corp. was negligent because it failed to lubricate the device. A jury in Roanoke Circuit Court agreed, and ordered the railroad to pay Stover $500,000.

But Judge Clifford Weckstein set aside the verdict, basing his decision in large part on the testimony of George Hockaday, an expert witness who testified for Stover that the derail had not been properly lubricated.

Hockaday never inspected the derail, but based his decisions on photographs of the device taken weeks after the accident. Other witnesses had testified that they operated the derail numerous times after Stover was injured and experienced no problems.

In throwing out the verdict, Weckstein ruled that the expert's testimony was ``grounded in surmise and conjecture'' and ``failed to furnish a bedrock of fact upon which an opinion of negligence could have been predicated.''

Stover appealed that decision to the Supreme Court, arguing that ``reasonable people'' could have concluded that the accident was caused by the railroad's negligence.

``We do not agree,'' the Supreme Court ruled in a 14-page opinion released Friday.

In affirming the judge's decision, the high court noted that ``opinions of expert witnesses must be based either upon facts within the expert's own knowledge or upon facts established by other evidence in the case; otherwise, the opinions are speculative and possess no evidential value.''

During the trial, Stover testified that he felt a ``sting'' in his neck while operating the derail Sept. 11, 1990. ``I didn't think too much of it at the time, went on working,'' he testified.

But after developing numbness in his arm and hand, Stover stopped working and eventually sued the railroad.

At the time, the jury's verdict was the latest in what railroad officials called a string of excessive awards against Norfolk Southern - from $250,000 to a clerk who fell out of his chair to $4.7 million to a signalman injured when a metal door slammed shut on his back.

But since 1990, at least half of nine Roanoke jury verdicts awarding nearly $10 million to injured railroad workers have been reversed either on post-trial motions or appeal.