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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 to Fort Wayne in 1901, southwest to Huntington, and the lines multiplied until the 1910 city directory listed five traction companies serving the city. Northeast Indiana's web, assembled around 1902 by the Fort Wayne and Wabash Valley Traction Company and its fellows, ran from Fort Wayne southwest through Huntington, Wabash and Peru toward Logansport and Lafayette (built 1902); north to Garrett, Waterloo and Kendallville (1906); south to Bluffton (1906), through to Marion; southeast to Decatur (1907); and east through Van Wert to Lima, Ohio (completed 1905), where passengers connected for Toledo and Cleveland. Through cars reached Indianapolis two ways — over the Union Traction system by way of Bluffton and Muncie, and by way of Peru. For a farm family in Allen or Wells county the interurban was the practical railroad: a car every hour, a stop at every crossroads, and Fort Wayne's stores, doctors and courthouse at the end of the wire.
Kingsland, 1910: The web's catastrophe belongs to its record. On 21 September 1910, near Kingsland in Wells County, on the Fort Wayne–Bluffton line, two wooden-bodied cars met head-on and one telescoped into the other: the southbound extra No. 303, whose crew missed the siding, and the northbound local No. 233, a smaller Indiana Union Traction streetcar running on the Fort Wayne & Wabash Valley line; forty-one people were killed, in what is considered the worst accident in the history of interurban transit. The wreck forced the company into bankruptcy; it was reorganized as the Fort Wayne and Northern Indiana, failed again in 1919, and was bought by the Indiana Service Corporation — Samuel Insull's Indiana utility system, which from 1920 ran Fort Wayne's interurbans and streetcars together. In 1930 the Indiana Service Corporation's interurban operations passed to the Indiana Railroad, the consolidated system that was the last of the great Midwestern interurban networks.
The abandonment sequence: The end came line by line through the Depression, each abandonment replaced, where anything replaced it, by buses. The Decatur line had already gone in 1927 and the Lima line in 1932. On 15 March 1937 the Indiana Railroad abandoned the old Indiana Service lines north from Fort Wayne to Waterloo, Garrett and Kendallville. The Wabash Valley line — Fort Wayne to Wabash — was replaced by buses in 1938, and that September the Indianapolis–Fort Wayne service by way of Peru was abandoned, leaving only the Muncie route. On 18 January 1941 the remaining Indianapolis–Fort Wayne and Bluffton service ended; the last interurban car from Fort Wayne pulled into the Indianapolis terminal at 12:35 in the morning of 19 January 1941, and the Indianapolis Star recorded that the end came "without undue fanfare." The Indiana Railroad's remaining freight motors wound down by 1942. In forty years the web had been built, had carried a generation, and had vanished so completely that most of its rights-of-way are today field edges and trail corridors.
Sources: Fort Wayne Citilink history — interurban service to Fort Wayne in 1901, southwest to Huntington, the Indiana Service Corporation purchase and the 1930 transfer to the Indiana Railroad; Indiana Transportation History — the five companies in the 1910 Polk's directory; ChicagoRailFan transit-system record and the Indiana Railroad abandonment chronology — Fort Wayne–Wabash built 1902, buses 1938; Fort Wayne–Bluffton 1906, to 1941; Kendallville/Waterloo 1906, abandoned 15 March 1937; Decatur 1907, abandoned 1927; the Fort Wayne, Van Wert and Lima line completed 1905, abandoned 1932; Indianapolis–Fort Wayne via Peru abandoned September 1938; the final Indianapolis–Fort Wayne and Bluffton abandonment 18 January 1941; Indiana Railroad history — the Kingsland wreck of 1910, forty-one killed, the Fort Wayne and Wabash Valley's bankruptcy and the reorganizations of 1919–30; Indianapolis Star of 19 January 1941, via the Indianapolis interurban retrospective — the last arrival from Fort Wayne at 12:35 a.m.