Mishawaka Public Transit: The streetcars, the interurban, the buses and the roads

Transit · the streetcars, the interurban, the buses and the roads

Mishawaka has been carried for hire since October 1885, when a horse-car line built in a single month first tied the town to South Bend, and for fifty-five years the carriage of the two cities was one continuous succession of companies: the horse cars of the South Bend and Mishawaka Street Railway, the electric rebuilding of 1889-1895, the consolidations that folded the lines into the Indiana Railway and then the Northern Indiana system, and the buses of Northern Indiana Transit that replaced the last streetcars on 15 June 1940. Through the middle of that course ran the interurban — the electric line to Elkhart and Goshen that made Mishawaka a through stop from 1898 to 1934 — and around it the roads took the traffic the rails let go: the Lincoln Highway down Lincolnway from 1913, the US 20 bypass completed past the city's south side in 1992, and the Capital Avenue corridor finished in 2012-13. The public corporation the two cities formed in 1968, Transpo, still runs Mishawaka's buses in November 2026, now beside a second system, the Interurban Trolley, whose very name recalls the cars of 1898. This section tells that carriage whole: the horse cars, the electric rebuilding, the system years, the interurban and its station, the last streetcars, the private bus years, the public corporation and its Mishawaka transfer center, the present network, the cross-county trolley buses, the highway courses, the river crossing as a service, and the airfield test.

The founding section carries the railways whole — the interurban, the streetcars, the bus succession. This addendum carries the two for-hire trades that ran beside the rails and that the section left short: the jitney, tested whole, and the taxi and transfer trade, from the directory roll to the present curb.