Pacific Gas & Electric Co. v. Crockett Land & Cattle Co.

Action to quiet title to an alleged easement consisting of a certain right of way for a pole line and to restrain defendants from interfering with its use.

Plaintiff is a public utility corporation, and it claims that it and its predecessors in estate have owned and actually possessed and used the electric transmission line in question across the premises of defendant corporation since about the year 1901. The interests claimed in the amended complaint are the right to the easement of the pole line, which is described by surveyor’s angles and distances; the right to repair; a right of way of ingress and egress thirty feet wide along the line of the poles, and the right to an easement for the overhang along the boundary line.

The evidence discloses that the pole line so situated on the defendants’ property consists of twenty-six poles, each pole being approximately twenty-nine feet in height above the ground, with a vertical pipe extension affixed to the top thereof five feet in length. On each of these poles there are three cross-arms. The lower one carries telephone wires used by the plaintiff company for its own private purposes; the next supports three strands of wire through…