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1983–1999 · FROM THE STATE'S OWN LIST
The state's railroad-abandonment list settles the question the frame left open. The Indiana Department of Transportation's "Indiana Railroad Abandonments" list, read first-hand, carries the Fourth District's end segment by segment (distances and dockets as the list prints them): Gary to Dillon, 41.72 miles, 1983, Docket AB-10(24); Ashley-Hudson to Wakarusa, 30 miles, 1985, Docket AB-10(21F) — a stretch that begins east of this town; the last Gary stub, 1.1 miles, 1988, Docket AB-290(47X); the Wolcottville–South Milford remnant to the PGRV in 1991, AB-353X; and the South Bend–Dillon stub, 15.47 miles, 1999, AB-290(197X) — the piece between the county seat and this town's western neighbour, which outlived the town's own segment by a decade. The segment through North Liberty is the list's row: NS, Gary East Line, Pine (milepost 186.64) to Wakarusa (milepost 170.24), 16.4 miles, Docket AB-290(34), year 1989. Gap G-SP-2 is settled on that row: the Wabash corridor through town was abandoned in 1989, between the last stub at Gary (1988) and the South Bend–Dillon stub (1999), and the abandonment runs Pine–Wakarusa — the town inside a sixteen-mile cut. The federal notice behind Docket AB-290(34) was itself searched for in the Federal Register and not retrieved; the list is the carrier of record, and the settlement stands at INDOT-list strength.
Three cautions ride with the settlement, printed whole. Conflict C101: the list's own figures for its endpoint disagree — Wakarusa is given at milepost 170.24 in the Pine–Wakarusa row and in the Ashley-Hudson–Wakarusa row, but at 122.53 in the 1985 Ashley-Hudson–Wakarusa row (AB-10(21F)); the year and docket of the town's segment are unaffected, but the list's mileposts are not internally consistent, and the settler is the list's own PDF page read as an image. Conflict C103: the district's historian himself distrusts the list — Baird wrote (TrainOrders, 21 January 2005) that "the abandonment dates on the INDOT site do not always match with other sources," though his examples were other segments; against his caution stands the AB-290(34) row itself, uncorroborated by the federal notice. Both carriers print; the settlement is taken at list strength with the caution attached, not silently above it. And the town's own plan supplies the physical residue: the corridor through town is a town-owned linear parcel along Wabash Avenue (see the depots article).
The Three I's end did not settle at the same strength. The INDOT list carries no row for the South Bend–Wheatfield/Kankakee line at all — its only Wheatfield hit is a differently described Conrail NIPSCO Branch row (AB-167(194,5,6N), 1982), which describes coal-plant trackage and is printed here expressly NOT equated with the Belt. The banked secondary dating therefore stands as it stood: Conflict C102: the line's end is given as abandonment in 1982 by one secondary carrier and as track removed in 1983 by another, with informal accounts spreading "sometime in the 80s" — the docket number and the exemption notice unreached. The item stands as gap G-W1T-3, its settlers the STB/ICC docket records for the Kankakee Belt abandonment; the 2004 caption record of the diamond's surviving signage (see the diamond article) corroborates only that the rails were long gone by then. The corridor's afterlife is in the town's own hands in part: the Tamarack Trail runs the Three I corridor between the North Liberty Community Center and the Youth League Ballpark — the town council's minutes name "the old 3I railroad right of way" as the project ground across November 2014 to March 2015, and INDOT's letting of 13 January 2021 (contract R-39089-A) ran the Potato Creek / North Liberty Park / State Road 4 Trail Phase 2 on it. The trail's whole belongs to the parks and recreation leg; it is pointed to here, not re-told.
Principal sources: INDOT, "Indiana Railroad Abandonments" list (read first-hand); Baird, TrainOrders 21 January 2005 (snippet); North Liberty Town Council minutes, 2014–2015 (snippet strength); INDOT letting notice R-39089-A (snippet strength); the banked spine record for the secondary dating.