Indiana Service Corporation

1920 – merged into I&M 1948

Founded: Incorporated 15 January 1920 (the Railroad Retirement Board's general counsel opinion gives 15 January; a contemporary ICC filing gives the creditable-service start as 16 January) as successor to the Fort Wayne & Northern Indiana Traction Company, with its principal office in Fort Wayne's Utility Building.

What it did: A general public-utility company: electric power and light (the private system alongside municipal City Light), natural gas, and the electric railways — the Fort Wayne street railway system and interurban lines radiating to Kendallville and Garrett, to Bluffton and Marion, and southwest through Peru toward Lafayette, including through service to Indianapolis.

Course: The company's transit ancestry ran back to the Citizens Street Railroad Company of 1872 (horse cars on Calhoun Street), through the Fort Wayne Electric Railway and Traction consolidations of the 1890s and the Fort Wayne & Wabash Valley Traction Company (assembled c.1902; reorganised after the 1910 Kingsland wreck as the Fort Wayne & Northern Indiana, which failed in 1919). Indiana Service added the Fort Wayne & Northwestern (1924) and the Marion & Bluffton Traction Company (1926). In 1925 Samuel Insull's Midland Utilities Company acquired control. In 1930 the rail properties were folded into Insull's Indiana Railroad system; the Securities and Exchange Commission's dissolution of Midland Utilities then divorced the interurbans from the power company's subsidy, and abandonments followed — the Fort Wayne–Waterloo/Garrett/Kendallville lines on 15 March 1937, the Garrett–Fort Wayne freight line on 10 May 1945.

Fate: Transit operations were sold in 1948 to the private Fort Wayne Transit Company (the ancestor of today's Citilink). Effective 31 August 1948 the Indiana Service Corporation itself was merged into the Indiana & Michigan Electric Company — the AEP-system company that serves Fort Wayne electricity to this day.

Sources:

1. General Counsel opinion L-42-188, Railroad Retirement Board (govinfo) — incorporation as successor to the Fort Wayne & Northern Indiana Traction Co.; Insull control 1925; the Garrett line abandonment, 10 May 1945; the I&M merger, 31 August 1948.
2. Indiana Railroad, Wikipedia (predecessor companies) — the traction lineage; the 1924 and 1926 acquisitions; the March 1937 abandonments.
3. Chicago Railfan, Insull holding-company chart — Indiana Service Corp. acquired by Midland Utilities 1925; transit operations sold 1948.
4. Trolley Tuesdays, "The Fort Wayne Transit Company" — Citizens Street Railroad 1872; the 1890s consolidations; Citilink succession.