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1854 · THE SUCCESSION, LITERAL
The delivery: Fort Wayne's railroad age began with an irony the record states plainly: the first locomotive to reach the city arrived not under steam but as freight. The Ohio and Indiana Railroad was completed to the south side of Fort Wayne on 31 October 1854, and its first locomotive had come up from Toledo the way everything had come for twenty years — by canal boat, shipped in pieces, unloaded at the canal landing and assembled in Francis Comparet's warehouse. The first railroad excursion train arrived from the east on 15 November 1854. The succession then completed itself in kind: the canal company's Fort Wayne section passed in 1881 to the new Nickel Plate Railroad, which in 1882 dismantled the canal aqueduct across the St. Marys and laid its tracks on the canal's own route through the city — so that for a time, trains ran where the boats had run, on the same surveyed line.
Sources: the Trains section of this history — ACGSI, Railroad History of Fort Wayne (the first locomotive's arrival by canal barge from Toledo and its assembly in Comparet's warehouse; completion 31 October 1854; first excursion 15 November 1854); Rex M. Potterf, "The Wabash and Erie Canal," Allen County–Fort Wayne Historical Society (1957) (the 1881 resale and 1882 aqueduct dismantling).