Passenger service, lost line by line

1924–2003 · THE LEDGER OF ENDINGS

The losses are gathered here in one ledger, each dated from its own entry above, because the pattern is the story: The thinning began on the branches. The Pumpkin Vine suspended operations between SSS Junction and Galien in 1924, and its St. Joseph end closed in the mid-1950s. The Northern Indiana's interurban lines were abandoned on 1 June 1934, and the city's streetcars followed on 15 June 1940. The Jersey Line's passenger trains, two round trips a day in their time, were discontinued in the 1930s. Two endings the record does not date, and which this section leaves undated in its entries above, stand here as the gaps they are: the Michigan Central branch's last passenger trains, and the Vandalia branch's, whose final years were worked by doodlebugs. The trunk-line ending came all at once: the Grand Trunk's own passenger service ended 30 April 1971, and Union Station's last trains left on 1 May 1971, when Amtrak consolidated the remnant at the west-side station. The South Shore's downtown had already gone, on 1 July 1970. What Amtrak kept, it kept on the old Central route: the Lake Shore Limited from 1975; the Capitol Limited added on the 1990 reroute; the Pennsylvanian from 1998 to 27 January 2003, the ledger's last subtraction. Against the ledger stand the entries of survival: the South Shore's unbroken service since 1908, the second track of 2024, and two funded studies — the South Shore's airport realignment and Amtrak's Union Station return — that propose, on paper, to give the city back a station worthy of the trains it still has.

Sources:

1. The entries of this section — every date in this ledger is stated, with its sources, in the entry of the road it belongs to; this closing entry gathers them and adds none.