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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 service in 1912 (its predecessor, the Pennsylvania Special, dated to 1902) and stopped at Fort Wayne for the whole of its life on the Fort Wayne Line. In the Penn Central years the station still saw the Broadway Limited and a fleet of Chicago–New York trains besides — the Admiral, the Manhattan Limited and the Pennsylvania Limited among them. The Nickel Plate ran its own named trains over the 1882 line until it ended scheduled passenger service in 1959 — the carmen who inspected and repaired its passenger cars at the depots here transferred that year to freight work at East Wayne — and the Wabash and the Pennsylvania together ran the Detroit Arrow, the joint Chicago–Detroit streamliner that came through Fort Wayne over the Wabash's 1902 Butler cutoff and the Pennsy's rails. Amtrak's Capitol Limited, created 1 October 1981 as the Washington–Chicago train over the old Baltimore and Ohio route east of Pittsburgh and the Fort Wayne Line west of it, joined the Broadway Limited at Baker Street through the 1980s.
The thinning: The decline was structural long before it was final. The Pennsy Shops closed in 1953; the Nickel Plate's passenger trains ended in 1959; the Pennsylvania itself disappeared into Penn Central in 1968. When Amtrak took over the nation's passenger trains on 1 May 1971, Fort Wayne kept the Broadway Limited — Amtrak's incorporators chose it as the company's sole New York–Chicago route — and later the Capitol Limited, and for two more decades Baker Street Station, renovated by the railroad in 1952 and increasingly worn, remained a working big-city depot. It was the last of Fort Wayne's stations to do so: the Wabash's stood empty until its demolition in the 1980s, and the Nickel Plate's elevated station of 1955 had outlived its own passenger service by three decades.
11 November 1990: The end came not from empty trains but from a landlord's decision. Conrail, which had inherited the Fort Wayne Line, sought to abandon the lightly used portion of the old Pittsburgh, Fort Wayne and Chicago across northwestern Indiana, and Amtrak rerouted its trains off the line: the rerouting took effect with the timetable change of 10–11 November 1990 — the sources divide between the two dates, and the station's own record gives the Broadway Limited's last stop at Baker Street as 11 November 1990. The Capitol Limited went north through Cleveland and Toledo; the Broadway Limited went onto the former Baltimore and Ohio through Garrett, Indiana — where it ran until Amtrak discontinued it on 10 September 1995. Fort Wayne, a city of a quarter-million people, had no passenger trains. The substitute was Waterloo, a town of under 2,500 people twenty-five miles north, which got a platform and a plexiglass shelter on the Capitol Limited's new route — the Lake Shore Limited began stopping there as well in 1995 — and an Amtrak Thruway bus connection back to Fort Wayne that ran until 2 April 1994. Waterloo station, where the old New York Central depot building was moved and reopened for passengers in 2016, remains Fort Wayne's station in everything but name and distance.
Sources: Broadway Limited history — the Pennsylvania Railroad's flagship from 1912, Amtrak's sole New York–Chicago route from 1971, the November 1990 rerouting over the former Baltimore and Ohio via Garrett "due to Conrail's desire to abandon part of the former Pittsburgh, Fort Wayne and Chicago," discontinuance 10 September 1995; Capitol Limited history — Amtrak's train from 1 October 1981 over the Fort Wayne Line west of Pittsburgh, the rerouting of 11–12 November 1990, the Fort Wayne–Waterloo bus connection; Fort Wayne station record — the Penn Central-era Admiral, Manhattan Limited and Pennsylvania Limited, closing 11 November 1990; ACGSI Baker Street page — the Broadway Limited's last stop 11 November 1990; Waterloo station history — the station opened 1990, the Thruway connection to Fort Wayne until 2 April 1994, the Lake Shore Limited stop from 1995, the New York Central building moved and reopened 2016; TCU Lodge 6760 history — Nickel Plate passenger service ended 1959; Fort Wayne Railroad Historical Society, Short Lines (Winter 2015) — the Detroit Arrow on the Fort Wayne route.