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 companies. Fort Wayne's streetcars began with horse cars: the Citizens Street Railroad Company opened horse-drawn service on Calhoun Street in 1872 (one strand of the record dates the first horse-trolley line to 1871), and the Centlivre brewery's line ran out Spy Run to the brewery from 1887. In 1892 the horse lines were replaced by electric streetcars, and by 1895–96 the consolidated Fort Wayne lines — the Fort Wayne Consolidated Railway, which built Robison Park as its pleasure ground — ran an electrified system. A contemporary reckoning gave the city some 58 miles of street railway by 1939, and one modern transit study credits the peak system with 200 miles of track counting the interurban lines the same companies worked; the streetcar suburbs it built out along Calhoun, Broadway, Creighton and the rest are the Neighborhoods section's ground.

The conversion: From 1920 the streetcars were the Indiana Service Corporation's, run with the interurbans as one property. The end was administrative before it was physical: in December 1939 the corporation petitioned to substitute trackless trolleys and buses for 21 of the 58 miles of Fort Wayne streetcar line still running. The first conversion had in fact already happened — on 16 May 1939 the West Jefferson line, a streetcar route since 1872, went to motorbus. Line by line through the war years the cars came off, and on 27 June 1947 — the date the News-Sentinel's 1982 Cityscapes retrospective and the route history give, against a Williams Woodland Park brochure's 7 June — seventy-five years after the horse cars, the last Fort Wayne streetcar — the Broadway, Creighton and South Wayne lines were the survivors to the end — made its final trip, replaced by trolley coaches. The Indiana Service Corporation sold the transit property in 1948 to the private Fort Wayne Transit; the last trolley coach followed the streetcars in 1960. Nothing of the city system runs on rails today; George K. Bradley's Fort Wayne's Trolleys, 1870–1963, written at the end of the trolley-coach era, remains its standard local record.

Sources: ChicagoRailFan transit-system record — Citizens Street Railroad 1872, the 1892 electrification, Indiana Service Corporation 1920–48, buses introduced 1939, streetcars discontinued 1947; Fort Wayne Citilink history — horse cars on Calhoun Street 1872, Centlivre's Spy Run service from 1887, electric service under the Fort Wayne Electric Railway; ACGSI Public Transportation page — the 1871 variant for the first horse line, the December 1939 substitution petition (21 of 58 miles), the last streetcar replaced by trolley buses in 1947, the last trolley coach 12 June 1960, and Bradley's 1963 book; Trolley Tuesday's Fort Wayne Transit history — the West Jefferson conversion of 16 May 1939 and the Broadway, Creighton and South Wayne lines as the last, in 1947; the Williams Woodland Park historic brochure — the last streetcar's final trip 7 June 1947; Center for Neighborhood Technology, Reconnecting Fort Wayne (2007) — the peak track mileage, as attributed.