The Gary Local: the last mixed train in Indiana, through Lakeville

1933–1962 · the Wabash's passenger end

For its last twenty-nine years, Lakeville's Wabash passenger service was a freight train with a combine on the end. The record is the line historian's own, dug at first hand from his published research: "The Gary Local began operation in 1933, when regular passenger service was discontinued on the Fourth District. Until its last service in the fall of 1962, it used a heavyweight combine (long since demoted from regular passenger service) with two coal-fired potbelly stoves… it switched all the industries, interchanges, etc., and went west on M-W-F and east on T-TR-Sat. The crew was based out of Montpelier on the east end." The train was a scheduled train, designated a mixed in the employee timetable; it ran Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays from Montpelier to Gary and Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays back, staying overnight at its endpoints; it was in time dieselised with an EMD GP7; and it holds the distinction its historian documented in his book: the last mixed train in Indiana, operating to the fall of 1962. The changeover that created it is dated to the day by the same record: there were "two mixed trains btw Montpelier and North Liberty, Indiana the day before the Gary-Montpelier service started April 2, 1933" — so regular through passenger service on the Fourth District ended 1–2 April 1933, the banked date standing corroborated. Steam's own end on the district came later and is dated from a conductor's time book: the last steam, K-1 Mikado 2462 on a work extra at Westville, June 1952, the mixed and the through freights already dieselised. Lakeville's place in this record is stated at its true strength: Lakeville is a listed station on the Montpelier–Gary line, and the mixed worked all the industries and interchanges between its endpoints on its fixed pattern — so the Gary Local ran through Lakeville, westbound Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, eastbound Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, for twenty-nine years. No timetable or excerpt reached names Lakeville as a scheduled stop or gives its times; the town's scheduled stop is documented at route and station-list strength, not at timetable strength (gap G-TR-6). That is the honest size of it, and it is also the whole of Lakeville's twentieth-century passenger story on the Wabash: a through train until 1933, a mixed train until 1962, and nothing after.

Principal sources: Victor A. Baird, author of Railroading on the Wabash Fourth District (Erstwhile Publications, 2013), in his own posts (Trains.com forum, 25 January 2016; Trainorders, 18 July 2014 and 8 September 2014) — first-hand at author strength; Branchline Society station list SL 281 §38 (directory).