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Trains · the railroad city
Fort Wayne was a transportation city before it was anything else: a carrying place between rivers, then the summit of the longest canal in North America, then — for nearly fifty years after the Civil War — one of the most important railroad centers in the nation, a place where locomotives and palace cars were designed, built and rebuilt in shops that stretched for miles along the tracks. This section tells the railroad story whole: how the canal carried the first locomotive into town in pieces, how the lines multiplied until nearly a hundred trains a day served seven railroads, how the city twice lifted its railroads into the air to free its streets, and how, on 11 November 1990, the last passenger train pulled away from Baker Street and did not come back. The freight city never left. It is still here, and so — under steam, several weekends a year — is the 765.
Before the iron horse — the canal, and the railroad that replaced it
1832–1882 · THE FIRST TRANSPORT SYSTEM
The summit: The first transportation system built to Fort Wayne was not a railroad but a ditch. The Wabash and Erie Canal, ground for which was broken at Fort Wayne in February 1832, made the city the summit level of a waterway…
1854 — the first railroad, and the road to Chicago
1850–1869 · OHIO & INDIANA · FORT WAYNE & CHICAGO · PITTSBURGH, FORT WAYNE & CHICAGO
Hanna's road: Fort Wayne's railroad age was promoted, financed and largely willed into being by Samuel Hanna, the city's great canal-era merchant, who saw that the next system would be iron. When the Ohio and Pennsylvania…
The trunk-line city — Wabash, the south and north lines, and the Nickel Plate
1855–1882 · FORT WAYNE BECOMES A HUB
The Wabash, 1855: The Pennsylvania's road was the first into Fort Wayne, but not by much. The Lake Erie, Wabash and St. Louis Railroad, building west from Toledo along the Maumee and the Wabash and Erie Canal, completed its track…
The Pennsy Shops — where Fort Wayne built locomotives
1857–1953 · THE PITTSBURGH, FORT WAYNE & CHICAGO / PENNSYLVANIA SHOPS
The founding: A railroad hub is made of track; a railroad city is made of shops. In 1852 Samuel Hanna donated a parcel east of Clinton Street for the anticipated railroad shops. On the south side of the tracks, blacksmiths John…
The depots — Fort Wayne's succession of front doors
1851–1914 · EVERY ROAD ITS OWN STATION
The canal-basin depot: Fort Wayne never had one station in its railroad century; it had a procession of them, one for nearly every road. The first stood where the two transport ages met: a frame depot and engine house at the…
The interurban web — electric cars to everywhere
1901–1941 · THE FORT WAYNE ELECTRIC NETWORK
The web: Between the steam railroad and the automobile, Fort Wayne sat at the center of a third network: the interurbans, heavy electric cars running on their own tracks between cities at streetcar fares. Interurban service came…
Streetcars — the city's own rails
1872–1947 · HORSE CARS TO THE LAST RUN
Horses, then wires: The steam roads and interurbans had a smaller sibling inside the city: the street railway, which belongs in this section for its railroad character — the same rails-and-wires technology, worked by the same…
Railroad work — the shops' other history
1863–1892 AND AFTER · UNIONS, YARDS, AND THE STRIKES THAT CAME BY RAIL
The working city: The Pennsy Shops entry above counts the men; this entry is about the work as an institution. Railroad labor organized early in Fort Wayne because the shops were there: in 1863 the city's railroad men formed the…
Elevating the south side — the Pennsylvania and Wabash go up, 1909–1914
1909–1914 · THE FIRST ELEVATION
The problem: The railroads that made Fort Wayne also bisected it. The Pennsylvania and Wabash tracks ran side by side along Baker Street at street level across the whole south edge of downtown, and by the early twentieth century…
"Elevate the Nickel Plate" — the north side waits forty years, 1947–1956
1947–1956 · THE SECOND ELEVATION
The barrier: What the Pennsylvania's elevation did for the south, the Nickel Plate's street-level tracks undid for the north. The Nickel Plate ran the length of the city between Columbia and Superior streets at grade — thirty-two…
The named trains — and the long goodbye, 1912–1990
1912–1990 · BROADWAY LIMITED TO THE LAST STOP
The flagships: For sixty years the measure of Fort Wayne's place in America was the trains that stopped there. Chief among them was the Pennsylvania's Broadway Limited, the road's flagship New York–Chicago limited, which began…
The freight city that remains — and the trains that are only proposed
1964–TODAY · NORFOLK SOUTHERN, THE CF&E, AND MIDWEST CONNECT
What runs: Passenger service left in 1990; the railroad never did. The consolidations sorted Fort Wayne's lines between two operators. Norfolk Southern — heir through Norfolk and Western to the Wabash (leased 1964) and the Nickel…
The 765 — the locomotive that still works here
1944–TODAY · NICKEL PLATE BERKSHIRE No. 765
The engine: One Fort Wayne train is famous far beyond the freight districts: Nickel Plate Road No. 765, an S-2 Berkshire steam locomotive built by the Lima Locomotive Works in September 1944 for the Nickel Plate's fast freights.…