The Michigan Central's branch from Niles

1870–2006 · THE AIR LINE BRANCH

The third steam road came down from Michigan, and its track ran past the college: The Michigan Central reached South Bend not on its main line — that ran through Niles, eleven miles north — but on a branch built by a local company, the St. Joseph Valley Railroad, which appropriated its right-of-way by corporate resolution on 8 March 1870 and opened its Niles–South Bend line in the spring of that year. The Michigan Air Line Railroad, building its Jackson–Niles line across southern Michigan, absorbed the St. Joseph Valley by merger on 11 October 1870; the Michigan Central leased the Air Line in 1871 and merged it in 1916, and the New York Central's lease of the Michigan Central in February 1930 made the branch the Central's. One dating conflict stands in the record and is printed as it stands: the National Register documentation and the branch's own corporate record put the line's building and opening in 1870, while the Michigan Air Line's compiled chronology dates "the branch to South Bend" to 1872 — the difference between the local road's opening and the Air Line's completion of its own line, most likely, but the record does not say so and this section does not reconcile it.

In South Bend the branch was industrial geography: the National Register's East Bank documentation records that it terminated at the Singer works on East Madison, with yards across Niles Street, and its course north ran through the ground of the University of Notre Dame and the Brothers of Holy Cross. Under the Central, Jackson–Niles was the Air Line branch and Niles–South Bend the South Bend branch. The branch outlived its usefulness by decades: a photograph of 1953 already captions the Harris Street crossing's track as "the former Michigan Central Niles Branch," the Niles end was removed in the 1980s, and the end of the story is a legal document — in August 2006 the Brothers of Holy Cross filed in a federal Surface Transportation Board docket over the line's disposition, recording that no rail service had been performed over the Notre Dame segment for well over a decade and that the sixty-foot right-of-way, appropriated in 1870 on terms lasting only while the railroad used it, had expired by its own terms.

Sources:

1. National Register of Historic Places, East Bank Multiple Property Documentation Form (1997/1999) — the Michigan Central branch built in 1870, terminating at the Singer facility on East Madison with yards across Niles Street.
2. The St. Joseph Valley Railroad's corporate record, as recited in the Brothers of Holy Cross filing in Surface Transportation Board Finance Docket No. 34893 (August 2006) — the right-of-way appropriation of 8 March 1870, the October 1870 merger into the Michigan Air Line, the line's completion and Michigan Central operation in 1871, and the absence of service for well over a decade by 2006.
3. McLoughlin's Michigan railroad history, as compiled — the St. Joseph Valley's Niles–South Bend line opened in the spring of 1870; the Michigan Air Line article's dating of the branch's opening to 1872 is carried in the entry as the standing conflict.
4. MichiganRailroads.com's timeline and station record — under Michigan Central and New York Central ownership, Jackson–Niles the Air Line branch and Niles–South Bend the South Bend branch, running to Notre Dame and South Bend; both branches abandoned.
5. The Niles, Michigan history record — the Air Line Branch abandoned at Niles in 1937 and the South Bend Branch removed later in the 1980s.