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THE RECORD AS IT STANDS, NOVEMBER 2026
The diagonal and the grid meet at the crossings, and the crossings are the form in which most residents of the frame have always met the railroad. West to east, the section-line roads cross Canadian National's line at Bittersweet Road, Currant Road, Elm Road, and Ash Road, the state highway crosses it on its own slant at State Road 23, and the grid resumes east of the highway at Gumwood Road and Hickory Road — seven public crossings inside the frame, each a farm-lane crossing of the wagon era made over, in the automobile era, with gates, lights, and the county's and the railroad's shared maintenance. The Big Four branch added its own crossing set in its century — the Grand Trunk itself at grade beside the depot, the diagonal's roads northeast of the village, and Douglas, Cleveland, Brick and Day roads on its northward run — and those crossings died with the branch, unrecorded in any inventory this section reached. The full official inventory of the surviving line's crossings, with the federal crossing numbers and the casualty ledger the Federal Railroad Administration keeps for each, stands in the FRA's crossing database; it is named in the gaps as the settler for any count finer than the road grid itself supplies.
The freight record has the same shape: heavy through traffic, thin local traffic, and a timetable's residue for the local. The line's reason for existing in the Grand Trunk system was through freight between Chicago and the east, and that is its whole business now — CN's Chicago–Toronto corridor freight passing the village site at speed. The local record that survives at documentary strength is the 1984 employee timetable's: three set-out tracks in three miles — Princess Homes Inc., a mobile-home builder on the line west of the station (milepost 110.9); the Granger track itself (111.4); and Hickerson Lumber Co. east of it (113.1) — a lumber yard and a factory, the last industrial customers the timetable class names on this ground, in the years when the depot was already gone. The wreck test required of this section returns a clean and printable negative. The Interstate Commerce Commission investigated the division's serious accidents and published them; the two it preserves for the neighboring ground are South Bend's — the derailment of 28 April 1932, which killed two enginemen at the joint track by High Street, and the side collision at Olivers of 12 November 1938, which injured 185 passengers — and no ICC-investigated wreck stands on Granger ground in the record reached. The leg does not inflate the negative: crossing collisions of the automobile era belong to the FRA and press records named in the gaps, and the crime and events records of this build carry what the press carried, at their own legs' strength.
Sources: the crossing set as the road grid and the line's alignment give it, checked against Grand Trunk Western, South Bend Subdivision Timetable No. 2 (1984) (the three Granger-area other-tracks entries, quoted in the station entry); ICC Bureau of Safety reports, accidents of 28 April 1932 and 12 November 1938 (both South Bend; the 1938 report: side collision at Olivers, 185 injured, cause the Grand Trunk extra's failure to operate under control at the Michigan Central connection crossing).