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The boulevards were drawn for a city the railroads had cut into pieces, and the same legislature-enabled decade took on the grade crossings. Years of discussion ended, Griswold records, in an agreement between the city and the Pennsylvania and Wabash railroads, with work beginning in March 1910. The money had been the fight: the original state act of 1905 put sixty-five per cent of the cost on the railroads and thirty-five on the city, a split the city administration found unsatisfactory and let lie; the amendatory act of 1907 moved the railroads to seventy-five per cent and the city to twenty-five, with electric railways required to assume ten per cent of the city's share on streets their lines used. On those terms the south-side lines were lifted onto embankment and viaduct about 1913, removing the crossings that had throttled the downtown streets.
The north-side line — the Nickel Plate, running through the middle of the city on the bed of the old Wabash and Erie Canal, thirty-two trains a day — took another forty years. By 1923 the board of works was suggesting its elevation; rival promoters preferred rerouting the Nickel Plate onto the already-elevated Pennsylvania tracks; the slogan "Elevate the Nickel Plate" ran through the first half of the century. In 1947 Mayor Harry W. Baals signed an agreement with the railroad to elevate at seven crossings. Bonds were issued in 1953, ground was broken on December 15, 1953, and the two-mile elevation — $9 million, split forty per cent city, forty per cent county and twenty per cent railroad — was dedicated on October 4, 1955, with a special train behind the old steam locomotive No. 767; at the dedication only one of the two tracks was yet laid, and the work was not totally complete until 1956. The News-Sentinel's verdict, repeated across the local record, was that it was the greatest improvement to the city in half a century: it closed the fine old Nickel Plate depot by Superior Street, erased most of what remained of the canal's traces downtown, and opened the entire north side to the suburban and industrial growth that followed.
Sources: Griswold (1917), Ch. XLVIII ("Elevation of Railroad Tracks"); News-Sentinel, Kevin Leininger, "Traffic on right tracks" (Cityscapes, June 2, 1982), and Michael Hawfield, "Old train stations sadly reflect Fort Wayne's past" (April 18, 1994); Allen County Public Library / Allen County Genealogical Society, Nickel Plate Railroad pages (1947 agreement; groundbreaking December 15, 1953; dedication October 4, 1955; completion July 29, 1956); The History Center, souvenir groundbreaking shovel record (December 15, 1953).