The other interurban: the Northern Indiana Railway

1885–1940 · THE SECOND ELECTRIC WEB

The South Shore was the famous electric road, but it was not the only one — a second system tied South Bend to its Indiana and Michigan neighbors, and died a generation earlier: The system grew from the South Bend Railway Company, chartered 18 January 1885, whose October 1885 electric cars the Story of South Bend section records — argued, in the railfans' standard history, to be the first electric streetcars run on a major public street in North America. Eastern capitalists assembled the interurban system from 1897: Elkhart and Goshen were connected by 1898, Mishawaka and Elkhart in August 1899, and the merged companies became the Indiana Railway Company. (Mishawaka is a separate city with its own future build; its place in this web is boundary-printed, not absorbed.) The Chicago & South Shore Railway — no relation to the South Shore Line despite the name — completed its LaPorte–Michigan City traction line in 1903 and was acquired in 1906 as the LaPorte & Michigan City Traction Company.

The whole was created by merger in 1905 as the Northern Indiana Railway, and renamed the Chicago, South Bend & Northern Indiana Railway on its purchase of 25 January 1907. Its intercity lines were two: South Bend–Goshen, 25.9 miles, with seventeen round trips daily in 1917, hourly; and South Bend–Michigan City, 40.8 miles by way of Lydick, New Carlisle, LaPorte and Hudson Lake, with nine round trips daily on a two-hourly headway. Between the west edge of South Bend and New Carlisle the two rival interurbans ran side by side, the Northern Indiana's line just north of the South Shore's — competitors on parallel rails across the same countryside. The allied Southern Michigan Railway completed South Bend–Niles in 1905 and extended north the following year to St. Joseph and Benton Harbor.

The web's reach shows in the competitor's own paper: the South Shore's 1913 fare card lists its South Bend connections "for St. Joseph, Berrien Springs and Niles, Mich., Mishawaka, Elkhart, Goshen, Warsaw, Winona Lake, Peru" — the Goshen connection being to the Winona Interurban, and so to the whole Indiana traction network. The end was the industry's end: bankruptcy in 1927, reorganization as Northern Indiana Railways, bankruptcy again at the end of 1931, and the interurban lines' abandonment on 1 June 1934, the date this build's Spine settles. The city lines ran on without them: the last streetcars crossed the river on 15 June 1940, and bus service began the next day — city transit's own story, which belongs to the Transit pass.

Sources:

1. Central Electric Railfans' Association, Electric Railways of Indiana, Bulletin 104 (1960) — the South Bend Railway Company of 1885 and its eastern assembly from 1897, the merger of 1905 and the Chicago, South Bend & Northern Indiana succession of 25 January 1907, the Goshen and Michigan City lines' mileages and 1917 service, the side-by-side running west of South Bend, and the LaPorte & Michigan City Traction acquisition.
2. MichiganRailroads.com's timeline — the Southern Michigan Railway's South Bend–Niles completion of 1905 and its extension north the following year.
3. The South Shore Line's fare card of 1913 — the South Bend connections as the line itself printed them.
5. Monon.org's photographic record — the last streetcars' river crossing of 15 June 1940.