The Bus Succession: 1934 to Transpo, on This Corridor

the lineage, 1934–1968

The town's bus is the interurban, still running. When the interurban lines were abandoned in 1934, the railway replaced them with buses at once: the Northern Indiana Railway's own interurban bus service ran from South Bend to Elkhart and Goshen and to Niles, and Greyhound ran a through bus from South Bend to St. Joseph and Benton Harbor and between South Bend and La Porte. The railway was sold to Northern Indiana Transit in 1940; in 1960 the remaining interurban bus routes were sold to Indiana Motor Bus, and by the 1970s many of those routes ran less than once a day until the deregulation of the intercity bus industry in the 1980s ended the local service altogether. The city operation took a different path: Northern Indiana Transit dominated bus service until 1967, and Transpo — the South Bend Public Transportation Corporation — was formed in 1968 to continue its operations. The South Bend–Niles bus necessarily ran U.S. 31, now State Road 933, through Roseland geographically — but no source found names a Roseland stop on it, and that gap is registered (G-TRN-2) with the companies' timetables as its settler; the service itself is strong, its passage through the town is geographic inference at moderate strength, and a named stop is unproven. The street-railway inheritance stands at pointer strength only: Route 5's city lineage is a horse car in 1885, an electric streetcar in the 1890s, and buses introduced on 16 April 1936, and the Notre Dame campus streetcar ran from its construction in 1902 to 15 June 1940 — but no source shows a South Bend city street-railway extension to Roseland, and the North Michigan streetcar's territory was Michigan Street and Notre Dame Avenue within South Bend and Notre Dame.

Sources: ChicagoRailFan, Northern Indiana Transit History (the 1934, 1940, 1960 and 1980s entries verbatim); the Northern Indiana Railway record (the 1934 abandonment and June 1940 last streetcars); the South Bend Transpo and Transportation in South Bend records (the 1968 formation); ChicagoRailFan, South Bend Transit Routes (the Route 5 lineage); Notre Dame Magazine (the campus streetcar's 1902–1940 course).