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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 to Fort Wayne on 1 August 1855; the Fort Wayne News's 1907 retrospective remembered the first Wabash train arriving in the latter part of November 1855, pulled by "a pygmy engine," before crowds gathered from twenty or thirty miles around. The line ran on to Lafayette by 23 June 1856 and the Illinois state line that August, uniting in 1856 with its Ohio partner as the Toledo, Wabash and Western — the ancestor of the Wabash Railroad, whose Toledo–St. Louis main line passed through Fort Wayne, Woodburn and New Haven on the south side of the city. In 1902 the Wabash completed its cutoff from Butler, Indiana, to New Haven, bringing its Detroit–St. Louis trains through Fort Wayne as well; the road was leased to the Norfolk and Western in 1964, and its line is Norfolk Southern's Huntington District today.
South and north, 1869–1871: Three more roads made the hub. From the south, the Fort Wayne, Muncie and Cincinnati Railroad was finished to Fort Wayne in the autumn of 1869 — 109 miles to Connersville and a through connection to Cincinnati. From the north, two lines arrived almost together. The Grand Rapids and Indiana, a Fort Wayne-promoted project to reach Michigan's timber country and Little Traverse Bay, completed its link south from Grand Rapids to Fort Wayne in October 1870; in 1871 it gained control of the Cincinnati, Richmond and Fort Wayne, whose road from Richmond reached Adams Junction, outside the city, on 25 December 1871 and entered Fort Wayne over the Pittsburgh, Fort Wayne and Chicago's tracks — giving the Grand Rapids and Indiana a through Cincinnati–Fort Wayne–Grand Rapids–Mackinaw line of some 460 miles, worked as part of the Pennsylvania system. And the Fort Wayne, Jackson and Saginaw Railroad was completed one hundred miles north to Jackson, Michigan, in 1870; it passed to the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern and then the New York Central, and its Fort Wayne depot stood off Wells Street at Cass.
The Nickel Plate, 1882: The last of the trunk lines was the brashest. The New York, Chicago and St. Louis Railroad — named "the Nickel Plate Road" by the Norwalk Chronicle of 10 March 1881, before a rail was laid — was built at speed across northern Ohio and Indiana in 1881–82 as a double-track competitor to the New York Central's Lake Shore line between Buffalo and Chicago. Through Fort Wayne it took the route told in the canal entry: the old Wabash and Erie Canal right-of-way, bought in 1881, its aqueduct dismantled and its towpath corridor relaid with steel in 1882. The road's first train ran over the line on 22 October 1882. Fort Wayne became a Nickel Plate division point, with its passenger depot on Superior Street between Calhoun and Clinton, its Piqua Yard in the city and, later, its great East Wayne freight yard near New Haven. The Nickel Plate was leased to the Norfolk and Western in 1964 and is Norfolk Southern today.
The hub: By the turn of the century the city the roads converged on was, in the History Center's summary, for nearly fifty years from the Civil War until just after 1900 "one of the most important railroad centers in the nation." The railroad chapters of the period directories list line after line; at the opening of Baker Street Station in 1914, by the News-Sentinel's later account, nearly one hundred trains of seven railroads arrived or departed Fort Wayne each day, and a National Register district nomination puts arrivals and departures at some two hundred trains a day at the century's turn. The figures differ because they count differently; the fact underneath them — a mid-sized city doing a great city's railroad business — is the same in every source.
Sources: Wabash Railroad corporate history (Wabash Railroad Historical Society record) — the Lake Erie, Wabash and St. Louis completed to Fort Wayne 1 August 1855, to Lafayette 23 June 1856, the 1856 consolidation; ACGSI "First Things" — the November 1855 first Wabash train; Trains magazine, Wabash Railway history — the 1902 Butler–New Haven cutoff and the 1964 Norfolk and Western lease; History of Allen County (1880) — the Fort Wayne, Muncie and Cincinnati finished autumn 1869, the Fort Wayne, Jackson and Saginaw completed to Jackson 1870; Grand Rapids Public Library, Grand Rapids and Indiana Railroad Company collection — the Fort Wayne link completed October 1870, control of the Cincinnati, Richmond and Fort Wayne in 1871, the 460-mile line; ICC valuation record for the Cincinnati, Richmond and Fort Wayne — completed to Adams Junction 25 December 1871, entering Fort Wayne on Pittsburgh, Fort Wayne and Chicago trackage rights; Indiana Historical Society, Nickel Plate Railroad Collection — the Seney syndicate surveys, construction from April 1881, the first train 22 October 1882; TCU Lodge 6760 history — the Norwalk Chronicle naming of 10 March 1881; History Center — the "most important railroad centers" summary; the train-count figures as attributed in the text.