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1902–2012
The township's other steam track was a university plant railroad. The Notre Dame & Western ran from 1902 into the 1990s: a spur off the New York Central's Niles Branch — the Michigan Central line of the article above in its later ownership — that curved east, crossing U.S. 31 and paralleling Douglas Road. The university's own magazine quotes the Scholastic of 8 November 1902: "The work which has lately been completed is a branch of the main line of the Michigan Central between South Bend, Indiana, and Niles, Michigan. It is nearly two miles in length, running in a winding direction north of St. Joseph's Lake and terminating at the steam and electric light plant." The spur was never incorporated as a common carrier; it was the university's own coal road. Its remnant was about a mile and a half of track; the last rail service ran in 1995; the Surface Transportation Board approved abandonment in April 2012, and the tracks were taken out that year. The alignment is now the Coal Line Trail. The photographic record puts the branch on Roseland's doorstep — a Penn Central local photographed crossing Cleveland Road, the town's northern boundary road, north of St. Mary's College on 4 October 1974, and the branch described as having come down along State Road 933 at St. Mary's. Whether its rails entered the incorporated town's ground itself is not proven by any map read; the settler is the ICC valuation map of the Michigan Central's South Bend Branch, registered as gap G-TRN-3.
Sources: Notre Dame Magazine, "Echoes: The old ND&W"; Trains news wire, the 2012 abandonment report; Monon.org New York Central pages, the 1974 Cleveland Road photograph caption.