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1890–1964 · the second line
The second line was a through route that happened to stop here. Where the Vandalia was a branch built to reach South Bend, the Wabash's Fourth District was the Wabash's shortest Detroit–Chicago line, and Lakeville was a station on a main line. The building company filed its articles with Indiana on 28 February 1890 as the Montpelier & Chicago Railroad Company; the engineer George S. Morison reported to the Wabash directors on 1 June 1891 on the proposed extension from near Montpelier, Ohio; the mortgage was the Detroit and Chicago Extension, Montpelier to Clarke Junction, 149.7 miles; and tracklaying began at Montpelier on 1 July 1892, "to be continued west at the rate, it is expected, of two miles a day" (Railroad Gazette, 8 July 1892). The station list, at directory strength, runs the line through the town in both directions — distances from Chicago: Clarke Junction 26.0, Gary 30.6, Kingsbury 64.8, Dillon 71.8, North Liberty 79.2, Pine 84.8, Lakeville 87.3, Wyatt 93.0, Wakarusa 100.9, Topeka 126.1, Ashley-Hudson 150.7, Montpelier 175.1 — Lakeville standing 2.5 miles east of Pine, from which its Detroit-based milepost derives at about 184.1 (derived, labelled as such; the abandonments list's mileposts run from Detroit). Kingsford Heights, the incorporated town beside the line's La Porte County reach, produced no station row or carrier and is named as a gap (gap G-TR-9) rather than placed. Howard's county geography of the line (1907) is exact and prints as the period frame: "the northern line of the Wabash system, extends through the south part of the county, passing through Wyatt, Lakeville and North Liberty, and giving direct connection with Toledo and Cleveland on the east and with Chicago on the west."
Conflict C17 (carried whole): the system history dates the opening 21 April 1893; Poor's Manual, by way of the line's county history, gives freight from 30 April and passenger service from 14 May 1893; a LaGrange County compilation quoting Poor's for 1893 adds only that the line "would be opened for traffic about May 1, 1893" — consistent with the Poor's side, settling nothing (gap G-TR-11: the conflict's settler — the line's own first timetable or a dated opening notice — was not reached). The first train on the Fourth District in 1892 was itself a mixed train, Montpelier to Wolcottville (the line historian's record) — the district began, as it would end seventy years later, with a mixed train. The Wabash's corporate course is a pointer here: the road passed under Norfolk & Western control by the lease of 16 October 1964 (banked), the Wabash company existing on paper until the N&W–Norfolk Southern combination of 1982; the Lakeville segment's working name in its last decades was the N&W's, then Norfolk Southern's, Gary District (Gary East Line).
Principal sources: Branchline Society station list SL 281 §38 (directory, read first-hand); LaGrange County Gazette, "Legally called" (compilation quoting the company's filings, the Morison report and Poor's Manual); Howard (1907), Ch. VI §III §5; Baird, Railroading on the Wabash Fourth District (2013), author's posts.