The Vandalia: the Pennsylvania's road from Logansport

1884–PRESENT · THE SOUTHERN ROAD

The sixth road came up from the south, and it kept its own station to the end: The Terre Haute & Logansport Railroad finished its sixty-nine-mile Logansport–South Bend line in 1884, and the city granted its street-crossing franchise on 10 November 1884 — the instrument whose Calvert Street terms the United States Supreme Court would construe a generation later, in the case told with the elevation fight below. In 1900 the road built its terminal: a two-story brick depot at the southwest corner of Main and Bronson, rock-faced below with a bay window on the street side, the line's northern terminal, with yard and service facilities running south from Indiana Avenue past Calvert Street. The depot stood across from Studebaker's headquarters, and the plant was the road's reason: the Vandalia served the Studebaker works and interchanged with the New York Central and the Grand Trunk.

The Studebaker administration building itself carries the scar of that geography — its notched corner at Bronson and Main was cut to accommodate the connecting track between the Pennsylvania's line and the Central's, a connection severed when the Central and Grand Trunk were elevated, the notch remaining. On 1 January 1905 the Vandalia Railroad Company was formed by merger, taking in the Terre Haute & Logansport among its parts, and on 1 January 1917 the Vandalia was merged into the Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Chicago & St. Louis — the Panhandle — and so into the Pennsylvania Railroad outright. After Conrail's creation in 1976 the line was one of three South Bend routes the new system judged redundant, and most of it was lifted in the Penn Central and Conrail years. A tail of track survives in place as far as Ewing Avenue, unused, and the 1900 depot still stands, privately owned, doing business as Vandalia Station.

Sources:

1. Monon.org's South Bend railroads and stations record — the 1900 brick depot at Main and Bronson built for the Terre Haute & Logansport as its northern terminal, the yard and service facilities south from Indiana Avenue past Calvert Street, the Studebaker service and the interchange with the New York Central and Grand Trunk, and the depot's survival as Vandalia Station.
2. Vandalia Railroad Co. v. State ex rel. City of South Bend, 207 U.S. 359 (1907) — the city's street-crossing franchise of 10 November 1884 and its terms, from the Supreme Court's own recital.
3. ChicagoSwitching.com's South Bend record — the Studebaker headquarters building's notched corner, cut for the connecting track to the New York Central and left when the elevation severed it; the Pennsylvania's service to Studebaker from tracks west of the station.
4. The Vandalia's corporate record — the Vandalia Railroad Company's formation on 1 January 1905 and its merger into the Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Chicago & St. Louis on 1 January 1917; the abandoned-lines record for the branch's doodlebug last years, its piecemeal lifting, and the surviving tail track to Ewing Avenue.