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On the record
For ten minutes in print, this ground had a downtown. On July 31, 2001, a Canadian National train stopped across Indiana 23 in Granger and held the crossing for at least ten minutes while its two engineers got down and shopped: one bought two cartons of Marlboros for 63.61 dollars from cashier Sue Kubsch at the Szymborski Phillips 66 Subway on Indiana 23, the other collected dinner at the nearby Burger King, and an attempt to lift the crossing arms by hand failed before the train moved on. The South Bend Tribune told it on August 19, 2001, under Carol Draeger's byline, with CN's Chicago spokesman Jack Burke answering that, the incident being two weeks old, the company had no way of verifying it — and the story named the place it happened as "downtown Granger." There is no downtown on this ground to find. What the fame attaches to is a crossing, a gas station, and a burger restaurant at the railroad's State Road 23 grade crossing — the same junction ground the timetable fixes at milepost 111.4 in the transportation record, where the union depot (row 6) once stood and no commercial center in the downtown sense has ever stood. The fame is real and the ground, as described, is not: a wire-service-shaped anecdote pinned to a label the place does not contain. It is printed here as the class requires — the story whole, the ground fixed to the crossing, and the word "downtown" carried in quotation marks as the story's word, not this record's.
South Bend Tribune, August 19, 2001, Carol Draeger, "Granger traffic jammed as train engineers stop for cigarettes, food" (incident of July 31, 2001; Phillips 66 Subway cashier Sue Kubsch; 63.61 dollars, two cartons of Marlboros; Burger King; CN spokesman Jack Burke), preserved in full in the Trainorders railroad-forum archive, August 28, 2001; Arts's cigarette-train article; Transportation (the crossing ground; milepost 111.4 fixing).