The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
Marlette (1959), pp. 122–131, read entire for this section · gap G-TR-7's settler
The chapter the trains file located and left unread has now been read whole, and its verdict on the Lakeville proposal question is negative — printed here at full strength, with what the chapter holds and what it does not. Jerry Marlette's Electric Railroads of Indiana (1959) closes its survey with "Proposed Lines" (printed pages 122–131). The chapter's frame is stated by its author: more than 250 prospective companies filed papers of incorporation and another two hundred organised without incorporating, and the listing that follows "names only those companies filing papers of incorporation," giving corporate titles, proposed areas served, dates of incorporation, and work actually done. The list runs alphabetically, Albany to Winona, and this section read it entire. What it holds for the South Bend–Plymouth corridor is five entries, all of them routed on the Rochester axis or silent on intermediate points: the Logansport, Rochester and Northern Traction Co. (Logansport–Rochester–Plymouth–South Bend, 1902, 100,000 dollars, merged into the Fort Wayne and Wabash Valley Traction Co. in February 1904); the Indianapolis, Logansport and South Bend Traction Railroad Co. (1907; construction contract let January 1908; reorganised as the South Bend and Logansport Traction Co.); the Indianapolis and South Bend Traction Co. (1908, by way of Logansport, Rochester and Plymouth); the South Bend and Logansport Traction Co. itself (South Bend–Plymouth–Rochester–Logansport, 8 April 1908, 10,000 dollars — "graded Plymouth to South Bend, but bond trouble forced abandonment in June 1911"); and, crossing the corridor at Plymouth only, the Chicago, Gary and Fort Wayne Railroad (1912). What the chapter does not say is the verdict's core: the word Lakeville appears nowhere in it — nor anywhere in the book's digitised text; North Liberty, Walkerton and Tyner appear nowhere; and no McCullough, and no gasoline-motor syndicate of 1904, appears anywhere in it — the book's only gasoline mentions belong to operating rolling stock elsewhere. The chapter's own scope explains the silence without filling it: a gasoline-motor syndicate that never filed electric-railroad incorporation papers falls outside a list that names only incorporated filers, and Marlette warns in his preface that the work is a starting point, not a definitive record. The proposal test therefore stands complete at Marlette strength and prints as a verdict: no company in Marlette's "Proposed Lines" chapter routes a South Bend–Plymouth proposal via Lakeville, Union Township, or the Michigan Road axis; the 1904 McCullough syndicate is absent from the chapter entirely; and the banked routing of that syndicate via North Liberty, Walkerton and Tyner stands uncontradicted by the one source the build had left unread. The one new fact the read adds is the South Bend and Logansport's grading — grading begun between Plymouth and South Bend on an unstated alignment, abandoned in June 1911 — which is a proposed line that did earthwork on the corridor without ever becoming a railroad, and whose alignment Marlette does not give; it does not route anything via Lakeville, and it is not merged with the McCullough scheme, a different promotion in a different year. The electric line's wider succession, which the checklist also asks of this item, stands in brief from the system record: the surviving electric line, the South Shore, passed under Samuel Insull's control in the 1920s, through Depression receivership in the 1930s, wartime service, and into the public-authority era — the Northern Indiana Commuter Transportation District, created in 1977, which took the passenger railroad into public ownership in 1990 while freight service continued under the railroad's own name, the passenger–freight split that survives today. None of that course ever touched Lakeville, which no electric line ever reached; it is printed here because the checklist asks the item whole.