Definition
"Upon and across" is a phrase of statutory construction appearing in legislation governing railroad use of public streets and rights-of-way. When a statute authorizes a railroad company to lay tracks "upon and across" a street or highway, the two prepositions are read together as synonymous and complementary terms describing the same act: the physical occupation and use of the street surface with railroad tracks. The phrase does not distinguish between two separate modes of track placement; rather, it describes in full the manner in which a railroad may lawfully occupy a public thoroughfare.
Common Confusion
The phrase might suggest, on its face, that "upon" and "across" describe meaningfully different relationships — "upon" implying longitudinal use along the length of a street, and "across" implying transverse use cutting perpendicularly through it. Courts have rejected this reading. Under the rule of statutory construction applied to railroad right-of-way statutes, the two words are treated as synonymous when describing a railroad company's occupation of a street with its tracks. A researcher encountering the phrase should not read competitive or limiting force into either preposition.
Why It Matters in Research
This phrase is a narrow term of statutory construction with a specific doctrinal home: railroad right-of-way and street-use legislation, primarily from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Its significance is almost entirely historical and jurisdiction-specific. Researchers working in that period will encounter the phrase in state enabling acts, municipal franchise ordinances, and litigation over whether a railroad's use of a public street exceeded its statutory authorization.
The key research trap is reading the phrase with modern grammatical instincts. A contemporary researcher might parse "upon" and "across" as distinct spatial relationships and conclude that a statute using both words authorizes two different types of use. The Kentucky authority collected in Bouvier collapses that distinction. When either word appears alone in a comparable statute, the interpretive question reopens — courts in other jurisdictions may or may not have followed the same synonymous-construction rule.
Researchers should also note that the phrase appears almost exclusively in the context of surface street occupation. It does not carry the same interpretive weight in easement instruments, deed descriptions, or general railroad corridor grants, where spatial prepositions may be given independent meaning depending on drafting context.
For corpus researchers working in Law Mind materials, this phrase signals a cluster of related issues: the scope of railroad franchises, the distinction between a railroad's use of a public street versus a private right-of-way, municipal regulatory authority over tracks, and the police-power dimensions of street-use statutes. Finding "upon and across" in a historical source is a reliable indicator that the surrounding text addresses railroad franchise scope or street-obstruction disputes.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's Law Dictionary provides the sole collected authority on this phrase, citing a single Kentucky decision for the proposition that the words are synonymous in the railroad street-use context. The entry is compact and doctrinal rather than analytical — it records the interpretive rule without explaining the court's reasoning or situating it in broader statutory construction doctrine.
Bouvier does not address whether the synonymous-construction rule extends beyond Kentucky or beyond railroad-specific statutes. It does not discuss how courts might handle the phrase in deed language, easement grants, or other private instruments. Historical dictionary coverage of this phrase is sparse precisely because its legal significance is so narrow; it was a phrase worth recording when railroad street-use litigation was common, but it attracted no sustained treatise attention.
What the historical sources miss: the phrase's functional obsolescence. As railroad franchise litigation declined across the twentieth century, "upon and across" ceased to appear as a live interpretive question. Modern statutory drafters do not use the phrase, and modern courts are unlikely to encounter it outside historical title or franchise disputes.
Jurisdictional Note
The synonymous-construction rule is documented from Kentucky authority. Whether other jurisdictions applied the same interpretive approach depends on the specific language of each state's railroad enabling legislation and local case law. Researchers working outside Kentucky should treat the rule as persuasive rather than settled.