The questions presented for our consideration are: 1. Whether a case for removal was made by the company; and, 2, if it was, whether, as it does not appear affirmatively that copies of the records have been entered in the Circuit Court, the company has lost its right to have the judgments reversed for the original errors in that behalf.
The Court of Appeals in Virginia held, as early as 1855, in Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Co. v. Gallahue's Adm'rs (12 Gratt. (Va.) 655), that the Baltimore and Ohio company could be sued in Virginia, and in the course of the opinion said that the effect of the Enabling Act of Virginia was to make the company a Virginia corporation as to its road within the territory of Virginia. Afterwards, in 1870, this court decided, in Railroad Company v. Harris (12 Wall. 65), that the company could be sued in the District of Columbia, into which a lateral road had been built with the consent of Congress, given through an enabling act much like that of Virginia. In that case we held the company to be a Maryland corporation only, and that no new corporation had been created by the Enabling Act either of Virginia or the District of Columbia. The ruling in the Virginia case was followed by the Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia in Goshorn v. Supervisors (1 W. Va. 308) and Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Co. v. Supervisors (3 id. 319), both of which cases were decided before Railroad Company v. Harris, in this court. That question is, however, unimportant here, as it is conceded that the part of the road originally in Virginia is now in West Virginia, and that the company no longer uses in Virginia any of the franchises conferred by the Enabling Act of that State. Neither the Court of Appeals nor counsel here make any claim on account of that legislation. Even conceding that the company was once a Virginia corporation, so far as its original road in that State was concerned, the most that can be said of it now is, that, in common with all citizens of the old State residing on the ceded territory, its citizenship was transferred by the organization of West Virginia from the old State to the new. Consequently, if it was once a corporation of Maryland and Virginia, it is now a corporation of Maryland and West Virginia. Any citizenship it may have had in Virginia has been lost.
It is not contended that this Enabling Act gave the company a right to lease another Virginia road and operate it as a lateral road, nor that in running the leased road the company uses any of the franchises conferred by the original grant. The present claim is that, by using the franchises of another Virginia corporation to run its leased road, it made itself a corporation of Virginia for all the purposes of that business, just as the lessor was and is.
It is well settled that a corporation of one State doing business in another is suable where its business is done, if the laws make provision to that effect. We have so held many times. Lafayette Insurance Co. v. French, 18 How. 404; Railroad Company v. Harris, supra; Ex parte Schollenberger, 96 U.S. 369. This company concedes that it was properly sued in Virginia. What it asks is, that, being sued there, it may avail itself of the privilege it has under an act of Congress, as a corporation of Maryland, and remove into the proper court of the United States exercising jurisdiction within Virginia a suit which has been instituted against it by a citizen of the latter State. The litigation is not to be taken out of Virginia, but only from one court to another within that State. So that the single question presented is, whether, by taking a lease of the road of a Virginia corporation, the Maryland corporation made itself also a corporation of Virginia, for all purposes connected with the use of the leased property.
