Horse cars first: the test, run

BRANCH · TRANSIT · BEFORE THE INTERURBAN

Lead: The test the banked file skipped has now been run, and the answer is negative — on this ground. Jerry Marlette's Electric Railroads of Indiana, the county histories and the Gazette-line record were searched for a horse-car company, a mule car, or a first electric experiment in New Carlisle or Olive Township, and none is there. The record is demonstrably capable of naming such companies where they existed: it names Elkhart's Citizens' Street Railway Company, organized in 1886 expressly to build a horse car line and converted to electricity in 1891. No equivalent entry exists for this town.

What the record holds is one boundary line, and it belongs to South Bend. The South Bend Street Railway was incorporated in 1873 and received its common council franchise in 1880, authorized to lay rails and draw its cars by horses or mules and no other power. “The first recorded attempt at electrification in Indiana was that of the South Bend Street Railway in 1882” — Marlette's words — when the car could move only a few feet at a time, the current dissipating into the ground faster than the power house could supply it. On 15 November 1885 (the trade record also gives 14 November) Charles J. Van Depoele ran the first successful electric car in Indiana on Michigan Street in South Bend; it was technically a success and an economic failure, and the line reverted to mule power early in 1886 while Van Depoele kept developing his system. Every one of those experiments stood on South Bend ground. New Carlisle's first rail transit is the interurban of the banked file, and it prints there.

Sources:

1. Jerry Marlette, Electric Railroads of Indiana (1959), “In the Beginning” — mule power as the state standard, the 1882 South Bend attempt, the November 1885 Van Depoele run and the 1886 reversion.
2. A Standard History of Elkhart County (1916) — the Citizens' Street Railway horse car line of 1886 as the positive control; the South Bend system narrative.
3. Edythe J. Brown, The Story of South Bend (1920) — 1873 incorporation, 1880 franchise, horses-or-mules clause, 1882 trolley attempt.