Freight today: three railroads and a remnant

PRESENT · THE FREIGHT CITY

The passenger century ended; the freight city the passenger trains shared the tracks with never left: Three operators work South Bend in 2026. Norfolk Southern's Chicago Line — the Lake Shore's road, the Water Level Route — runs through the elevated downtown on the 1929 viaduct, among the busiest freight corridors in the country, and carries the city's two Amtrak trains as tenant. Canadian National's South Bend Subdivision, the Grand Trunk's line, crosses the river on the 1929 Howard Park bridge and runs the city's north side. The third is the Chicago South Shore & South Bend Railroad, Anacostia Rail Holdings' Class III freight road, headquartered at Michigan City, running diesels the length of the old interurban under NICTD's wires: it delivers coal to the NIPSCO generating station at Michigan City, and since 2001 it has also operated the former Nickel Plate's Indianapolis, LaPorte & Michigan City line, bought from Norfolk Southern.

Below those three, a remnant: Norfolk Southern works the lightly used South Bend local trackage — the surviving pieces of the Kankakee Belt, the Jersey Line and the Vandalia — out of an office under the Sample and Olive overpass, serving no more than five customers in total across those lines. The great rail-served plants are gone from the rails: Bendix, now Bosch, is no longer rail-served, as the Chicago switching record documents, and the Studebaker works that five railroads competed to serve closed in December 1963. Studebaker kept a railroad of its own inside the plant fence — the Chicago & South Bend, its in-plant switching road — which Jan Young's Studebaker and the RailroadsThe yards, spurs and plant trackage of the steam century are otherwise told where they belong, in the entries of the roads that built them and in Industrial Revolution's account of the rail-served plant.

Sources:

1. The Kankakee Belt Route's compiled record — Norfolk Southern's present working of the South Bend local trackage over the Kankakee Belt, Jersey Line and Vandalia remnants from the Sample and Olive office, with no more than five customers in total.
2. The Chicago South Shore & South Bend Railroad's record (Anacostia Rail Holdings) — the Class III freight road over the full Chicago–South Bend line, its Michigan City headquarters, the NIPSCO coal service, and the 2001 purchase of the former Nickel Plate Indianapolis, LaPorte & Michigan City line from Norfolk Southern.
3. ChicagoSwitching.com's South Bend record — Bendix, now Bosch, no longer rail-served.
4. Young, Studebaker and the Railroads, vol.
5. This build's Industrial Revolution section — the rail-served plants, cross-referenced.