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Fort Wayne has ridden three systems on the same streets. The first ran on rails behind horses: the Citizens Street Railroad opened horse-drawn service on Calhoun Street in 1872, from the Pennsylvania depot to the Aveline Hotel, and the Centlivre brewery ran its own horse cars out Spy Run. Electrification, expansion and slow decline fill the traction era's long middle, including an experimental motor bus the streetcar company tested and quickly abandoned as unprofitable. The conversion came between 1939 and 1960, rubber replacing rail route by route. The private Fort Wayne Transit company ran the buses from 1948 to 1968, when the city took the system public under Indiana's Urban Mass Transportation Act of 1965, through the Public Transportation Corporation. Its successor, Citilink, works from Leesburg Road today; the section carries the system's own dated figures for fleet, miles and riders, as published.
Transit · from horse cars to Citilink
Fort Wayne has had public transit, under one owner or another, since 1872 — and it has changed its technology three times and its ownership four. The street railway came first, horse-drawn and then electric; the wires came down between 1939 and 1947 in favor of trolley coaches and motor buses; the private operators who ran the buses failed, as private operators were failing everywhere, and in 1968 the city itself bought the system under Indiana's Urban Mass Transportation Act and has run it since, as the Fort Wayne Public Transportation Corporation — the buses the city knows as Citilink. The Trains section tells the railroads and interurbans in full; this section tells the succession whole, from the first horse car on Calhoun Street to the funding fights of 2025.
The street railway in brief — the system this story inherits
1872–1947 · HORSE CARS, THEN ELECTRIC CARS
Horses on Calhoun: 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 — running from the Pennsylvania Railroad depot…
Rubber replaces rail — the conversion, 1939–1960
1939–1960 · MOTOR BUSES, THEN TROLLEY COACHES, THEN BUSES ALONE
A first experiment: The motor bus appeared in Fort Wayne a generation before it won. In the traction era the Fort Wayne and Northern Indiana company tested an experimental bus service on the city's west side; the primitive buses…
Fort Wayne Transit — the private bus company, 1948–1968
1948–1968 · THE LAST PRIVATE OPERATOR
The sale: In 1948 the Indiana Service Corporation — a utility holding company, in the age when utilities were getting out of the transit business — sold Fort Wayne's transit property to a private company, Fort Wayne Transit. (A…
Public ownership — the Public Transportation Corporation, 1968
1965–1968 · THE STATUTE, THE FINDING, THE PURCHASE
The Indiana mechanism: Fort Wayne's takeover followed the path Indiana law had laid down in the Urban Mass Transportation Act of 1965, whose machinery the Court of Appeals later described in the Fort Wayne case itself. A system…
Citilink — the modern system
1968–TODAY · TWELVE ROUTES AND A DOWNTOWN STATION
The system as documented: The PTC operates from its garage and headquarters at 801 Leesburg Road. Its scale, at the dates the published record fixes it: in 2012 the combined fleet numbered 52 buses, and fixed-route buses ran…
Access — the paratransit service
THE DEMAND-RESPONSE HALF OF THE SYSTEM
What it is: Alongside the fixed routes the corporation runs Citilink Access, the complementary paratransit service the Americans with Disabilities Act requires of fixed-route operators: curb-to-curb, reservation-based rides for…
Fares and the funding fights
2008–2026 · FIVE CENTS TO A FISCAL CLIFF
The fare: The fare was five cents under the streetcars in 1913, a dollar under Citilink at the start of 2008, and $1.25 with a $3 day pass by 2012 — reduced fare sixty cents, monthly pass $45. The 2008 increase set the pattern of…
Intercity buses — Greyhound, Trailways and the depots
1930s–TODAY · THE OTHER BUS SYSTEM
Two downtowns' worth of terminals: Alongside the city's own transit, Fort Wayne was a stop on the intercity bus networks, and its succession of depots — the addresses are those catalogued in ChicagoRailFan's classic bus station…
Taxis and the airport — in brief
1913–TODAY · THE UNREGULATED PARALLEL
The fare card: The taxi is the oldest for-hire transport in this record and the least documented. It appears in the 1913–14 Griswold-Phelps handbook with a published fare card — thirty cents for the first mile for one or two…