The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
1881/82 TO 1993
The junction existed because a Michigan company wanted the Grand Trunk's traffic. The Elkhart, Niles and Lake Michigan Railroad built south from Niles, Michigan, to a connection with the Grand Trunk at Granger — the Niles History Center dates the building to 1882; Orville Coolidge's Twentieth Century History of Berrien County (1906), written within living memory of the work, dates "a railroad built from Elkhart to Niles" to 1881 and names its corporation, in the 1906 text's garbled transmission, as the Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago and St. Louis. The two records print together: the year conflicts by one, and the endpoint conflicts in name — the company was chartered toward Elkhart and Lake Michigan, but the track it laid ran from Niles to Granger and the Grand Trunk, never to Elkhart. What the line gave Granger was a second railroad and a northward outlet: from the union depot a train could run up the east side of the St. Joseph River — Coolidge is explicit that the road "runs on the east side of the St. Joseph river" — through the state line to Niles and, after the extension, to Benton Harbor and the Lake Michigan steamers.
The succession is compact. The Cincinnati, Wabash and Michigan Railway bought the Elkhart, Niles and Lake Michigan and extended the line north from Niles to Benton Harbor — Coolidge, in 1906, carries the extension as done "shortly after" — making Granger the junction of the Grand Trunk with a through Indianapolis–South Bend–Benton Harbor route, whose trains ran south from Granger over the branch's own continuation into South Bend. The Big Four (Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago and St. Louis Railway) took the line in the consolidation that formed it: the Niles marker dates the Big Four's purchase to 1890, and the consolidation itself to the same turn of the decade; in 1930 the Big Four merged into the New York Central, and the branch became a Central branch — the "Niles Branch" of local usage — passing in 1968 to Penn Central and in 1976 to Conrail. Its dying took sixty years and came in the order the traffic left: passenger trains off the Niles–Benton Harbor end in the early 1930s; freight on that end until the early 1980s; and the last piece of the line, the South Bend–Niles trackage through Granger, closed in 1993 — the Niles record's dating, and the end of the second railroad on this ground after 111 years. In Michigan the corridor survives in part as the Indiana–Michigan River Valley Trail through Niles; in Indiana the grade reverted to the farms and subdivisions it had crossed, legible in the property lines northeast of the village site, its crossings of Douglas, Cleveland, Brick and Day roads unmarked.
Sources: City of Niles History Center, "Big 4 Railroad Marker" (the 1882 building; the CW&M purchase and Benton Harbor extension; the Big Four purchase, 1890; the 1930 New York Central merger; Conrail; passenger ended early 1930s; freight to the early 1980s; the last piece, Niles–South Bend, closed 1993; the River Valley Trail on the corridor in Niles); Coolidge, A Twentieth Century History of Berrien County, Michigan (1906), Part 7 (the 1881 dating and the east-side-of-the-river course, printed as the conflict above).