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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 record — maps the industry's rise and consolidation. Greyhound used a depot at 211 Berry Street in the 1930s and built its Streamline Moderne terminal at 223 West Jefferson Street in 1938, the building that survives on period postcards. Empire Trailways ran from 205 West Washington Street in the early 1940s and was gone by the decade's end. In 1941 the Indiana Railroad, abandoning its last interurban trains, replaced them with buses that used the Greyhound terminal; in 1948 it built its own bus depot next door, at 205 West Jefferson, and in 1950 its bus operations passed into Southeastern Trailways. Trailways worked later from a depot at 208 West Lewis Street (by the 1960s) and then the Union Bus Depot at 1031 Broadway (about 1970). Greyhound's last purpose-built Fort Wayne station opened at 929 South Lafayette Street in 1979.
Consolidation to one door: The pattern nationally — two rival networks, then one — played out in the addresses: the Trailways name disappeared into Greyhound's system in the 1990s, and the Lafayette Street station belongs to the era of the staffed downtown terminal. Today Greyhound, now under FlixBus ownership, lists its Fort Wayne stop as the Ft Wayne Citilink Central Station at 121 West Baker Street: the intercity bus boards from the city system's own 2012 station, the intermodal arrangement that station was designed to invite. Local and intercity transit, separate for a century, again share a door — as they briefly did when the Indiana Railroad's buses used the Greyhound terminal in 1941.
Sources: ChicagoRailFan, Classic Bus Stations and the Southeastern Trailways record (the depot addresses and dates; the Indiana Railroad bus succession of 1941–50); Greyhound Lines' Fort Wayne station page (the present Central Station stop, as currently listed). The depot catalogue is a specialist compilation and is cited as such; individual building histories are Architecture's to verify.