Depression, war, and the Chesapeake & Ohio years

1931–1970 · SURVIVAL

The South Shore outlived every other interurban in the country by being useful to freight shippers and indispensable to war workers: The Insull empire's collapse took the railroad into bankruptcy on 30 September 1933, but the South Bend end of the line got a Depression-era investment that shaped its freight century: in 1931 the new South Bend freight terminal was completed on sixteen acres a mile west of downtown, taking freight trains off the city streets and planting an industrial park on the terminal ground. The war made the line: six million passengers rode in 1945, the property's peak. The postwar decades thinned the interurban industry to this one survivor, and on 3 January 1967 the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway purchased the railroad, a steam road holding an electric one for its freight. The South Bend passenger's geography changed for good at the decade's end: on 1 July 1970 the line was cut back west of downtown — the street running on Orange Street and LaSalle Avenue, across the river to the downtown terminal that had served since 1925, ended — and the new station at Bendix Avenue and West Washington, the building Amtrak still uses, opened on 7 July 1970. The downtown station building at Michigan and LaSalle was demolished in 1974.

Sources:

1. Middleton, South Shore: The Last Interurban, and the Middleton chronology — the bankruptcy of 30 September 1933, the 1931 sixteen-acre freight terminal and the end of freight in the city streets, the six million passengers of 1945, the Chesapeake & Ohio purchase of 3 January 1967, and the 1970 cutback of the street running.
2. Monon.org's South Bend record — the downtown route's course (past Bendix, down Orange Street, across the river on LaSalle), the coach yard between the river and the East Race, the discontinuance of downtown service in 1970, and the 1974 demolition of the Michigan and LaSalle station.
3. South Bend station's compiled record — the new station at Bendix Avenue and West Washington opened 7 July 1970, built by the Chicago South Shore & South Bend.