The Death Crossing: four tracks at grade, and the cure

To 1925 · completed 1925 / until 1926 — both print

The 1913 route's straight run into town crossed, at the town's east edge, every rail line on the shelf in one place — and the crossing earned the worst name on the Lincoln Highway. The configuration, as the road surveys draw it: the highway ran straight across four tracks at grade — two of the New York Central, one of the Chicago, South Bend & Northern Indiana, and one of the Chicago South Shore & South Bend — and the tracks were not even level with one another, the interurban tracks lying a few feet lower than the steam road's, so that a driver climbed and dropped as he crossed. The Lincoln Highway marker standing before Town Hall at 124 East Michigan Street carries the verdict in the words the marker itself bears: this was "the most dangerous railroad crossing on the Lincoln Highway, and with the largest number of victims to its credit of any crossing on the coast-to-coast route." No count of the victims stands in any record reached — the marker's superlative is the documented form of the toll, and the number itself is a named gap in the closing article, with the press of record and the coroner's files as its settlers. Negotiations with the three railroads for a grade separation dragged on for several years; what moved them, the road-survey account records, was the town's own hand — New Carlisle passed an ordinance limiting trains to eight miles per hour through the crossing, and the talks then came to terms. The cure swung the road off its straight line onto a curve of 1.09 miles passing under two railroad overpasses east of town — the "strong curve" and the "tight, blind curve" that still introduce the town from the east, the retaining wall on the southernmost curve carrying the town's name to arriving traffic today. The completion is dated two ways in the record and both print: the survey account drawn from the Association's map gives the realignment as completed in 1925, while the same survey tradition's narrative and the Michigan Road survey give the straight road as running until 1926. The old straight alignment east of town survives as the ground's palimpsest — the road that was abandoned to its toll is still traceable beside the curve that replaced it.

Joseph County survey accounts (the 1913 route in St. Joseph County, parts 1–2); the Michigan Road survey of St. Joseph County; the National Register nomination (the 1.09-mile changed stretch).