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1890–1893 · THE OPENING DATE PRINTS AS CONFLICT C10
The road was built under a name the Wabash itself used only on paper: the Montpelier & Chicago Railroad Company, whose articles were filed in Indiana on 28 February 1890. The Wabash's engineer George S. Morison described the proposed extension to the directors on 1 June 1891 as "legally called the Montpelier and Chicago," and tracklaying began at Montpelier, Ohio, on 1 July 1892, working west toward Gary and the Chicago connections at Clarke Junction. A church periodical carries the town-level proof for North Liberty itself: "The Wabash railroad has passed through [North Liberty] the present year" (The Spirit of Missions, August 1893). The line the builders made was no branch: as the Fourth District it was the shortest Detroit–Chicago route on the Wabash system, a Toledo connection was added after 1900, and it became the first Wabash district dieselized, in 1950.
The day the road opened prints as a standing conflict of the register, carried whole. Conflict C10: one system history dates the connector's opening 21 April 1893; a county newspaper history citing Poor's Manual gives open for freight 30 April 1893 and for passenger service 14 May 1893. No carrier found resolves the pair, and neither side is preferred here. Two narrower facts stand beside the conflict without touching it: the first train on the Fourth District in 1892 was a mixed train between Montpelier, Ohio, and Wolcottville, Indiana (Victor A. Baird, the district's historian, at snippet strength); and no North Liberty–specific first-train date — the day the first train stopped in this town — was found in any record reached. That item stands as named gap G-W1T-10, its settlers the South Bend and predecessor papers of April–May 1893 and the Poor's Manual entry read whole.
Principal sources: the NL-1 frame record (Morison report; Spirit of Missions); Victor A. Baird, Railroading on the Wabash Fourth District (2013), as carried in his Trains.com and TrainOrders posts (snippet strength).