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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 token collectors' journal dates the private era from 1947 and describes the operations as sold after an unsuccessful 1947 shutdown; the transit histories generally give the sale as 1948, and that date is followed here.) Fort Wayne Transit inherited the trolley coaches and ran them until 1960, and built its motor-bus fleet the way small private operators did: by buying other cities' cast-offs. The surviving roster record shows secondhand Twin Coach and GMC buses acquired through the 1950s and 1960s from the transit systems of Niagara Frontier, Detroit and Indianapolis, among others, including a fleet of propane-burning Twin Coaches. The company issued its own fare tokens — a general-ridership token and a transfer token, catalogued as Indiana 290-C in Atwood's token catalogue.
The arithmetic that ended it: Nothing in Fort Wayne Transit's record suggests it was worse run than its peers; it was caught in the national arithmetic of the postwar bus business, in which the automobile took the riders and left the company the costs. By 1967, in Citilink's own history of the property, ridership was lagging and the system was no longer profitable — "as was the case for most bus companies at that time." The company's end was litigated into the permanent record: when its operating rights passed to the public corporation under Indiana's Urban Mass Transportation Act, the transfer drew a protest from the Indiana Motor Bus Company and reached the Indiana Court of Appeals as Fort Wayne Transit, Inc. v. Indiana Motor Bus Co., decided 29 October 1973. The private era, 1948 to 1968, had lasted twenty years — almost exactly the span the streetcars' conversion had taken.
Sources: Fort Wayne Citilink history and the History Center's transit posts (the 1948 sale; the 1967 ridership position); CPTDB Fort Wayne Transit roster (the secondhand fleet and its sources); The Transit Token newsletter, January 2021 (Fort Wayne Transit's tokens, Indiana 290-C; the 1947 variant dating); Fort Wayne Transit, Inc. v. Indiana Motor Bus Co., 302 N.E.2d 786 (Ind. App. 1973).