The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
1933 – FALL 1962
For twenty-nine years the Fourth District's passenger service at North Liberty was a single mixed train, and the district's historian calls it the last mixed train in Indiana. The Gary Local began operation in 1933, when regular passenger service was discontinued on the Fourth District, and ran between Montpelier, Ohio, and Gary, Indiana — westbound on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, eastbound on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, with a Montpelier-based crew whose trainmen, though not the engine crew, bunked overnight in the combine at Gary. What "mixed" meant here is defined in the record with care: a scheduled train designated as a mixed in the employee timetable, combining passengers with freight switching work — it switched all the industries and interchanges along the line. Other Wabash freights could carry a passenger in the caboose, but they were not called mixeds; except during the Second World War, the Gary Local was the only local on the line.
Its equipment was a heavyweight combine demoted from regular passenger service, heated by two coal-fired potbelly stoves — one in the passenger section, one in the baggage section — never turned, always riding on the end of the train; the train was later dieselized with an EMD GP7. It made its last runs in the fall of 1962. A timetable with train numbers and station times for North Liberty was not obtained for either of the town's lines; the settlers are named (the Official Guide's full-view editions at HathiTrust; the Wabash timetable collection at the Henry Ford, accession 2012.67) and the item stands as gap G-W1T-4.
Principal sources: Victor A. Baird, Trains.com forum post of 25 January 2016 and TrainOrders posts of 2014–2023 (snippet strength; first-person-sourced secondary).