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1898–1976 · one article per this section's rule, under every name
The road Lakeville knew changed its name four times and its master twice. In 1898 the line was sold and reorganised as the Terre Haute and Logansport Railway Company (the federal filing's history, read first-hand). On 1 January 1905 that company consolidated with the St. Louis, Vandalia & Terre Haute, the Logansport & Toledo, the Indianapolis & Vincennes and the Terre Haute & Indianapolis to form the Vandalia Railroad Company — 471 miles, the consolidation agreement filed in Indiana on 29 December 1904 and in Illinois on 31 December. Then the Pennsylvania absorption, whose form matters because the banked spine's shorthand gets it wrong. Conflict C110 — the consolidation year: the federal filing dates the Vandalia's consolidation into the Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Chicago and St. Louis Railroad to 1916, and a line history gives 30 June 1916 for the consolidation of "all the separate Vandalia and Panhandle lines"; the Vandalia's reference article dates the forming merger — the Panhandle merged into the Vandalia to form the PCC&StL — to 1 January 1917. Both print; the build does not harmonise them. What two carriers agree on is the step that made the line the Pennsylvania's in operation: in 1921 the PCC&StL was leased to the Pennsylvania Railroad. The defensible succession therefore reads: consolidation into the Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Chicago & St. Louis (1916/17), Pennsylvania lease 1921 — not the Story of Lakeville section's "to the Pennsylvania system in 1917," which stands flagged for assembly (DELTA-LK5-1). The line's working traffic in its Pennsylvania years is documented at line level: it was "a very important link for Studebaker Auto since it ended at their factories in South Bend," and it carried several grain elevators along its length (the line history, citing Meints). At Lakeville the passenger pattern of 1884 thinned in time to the gas-electric single cars the line is remembered for — the "Doodlebugs" that replaced regular passenger trains for a few years, at a carrier's anecdotal strength, undated; no carrier found gives the date the last passenger train stopped at Lakeville (gap G-TR-2). After Studebaker closed in 1963, traffic declined; the last daily freights were gone by 1969. The corporate end came in the two national mergers: Penn Central in 1968, Conrail in 1976 — by which time the Lakeville segment was already abandoned, as the ledger article below sets out. The line's South Bend stub survived them: track remained in South Bend in local use, and the last remnant of it — the Plymouth Industrial Track, mileposts 181.00–181.80 — was itself abandoned in 2013 at the City of South Bend's request, for the Ignition Park development (STB Docket AB-290 (Sub-No. 349X)).
Principal sources: STB Docket No. AB-290 (Sub-No. 349X) filing (first-hand); the Vandalia Railroad (1905–17) reference article and the Maxinkuckee compilation's brief history (compilations, printed against each other at C110); the South Bend Branch line history (Meints, Indiana Railroad Lines, 2011; Sulzer, Ghost Railroads of Indiana, 1998, as compiled).