The railroad century opens

4 OCTOBER 1851 — 1929

On October 4, 1851, the town's future changed gauge: The first steam locomotive entered South Bend that day on the Michigan Southern and Northern Indiana Railroad — soon folded into the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern — tying the bend by rail to Toledo, Chicago and the east. The road trade withered and the city boomed on through-runs: other lines followed across the next three decades, among them lines that became parts of the Michigan Central and, by 1880, the Grand Trunk's Chicago route, until South Bend stood as a genuine junction — a reason factories could come, and the reason some did: Vincent Bendix would choose the city in 1923 chiefly because it sat midway between Chicago and Detroit on a rail line, and the Bendix works he planted — Bendix Aviation Corporation from 1929 — grew into one of the largest industrial complexes in the city. The railroads also began, in time, to strangle the streets they crossed, and the city's long fight to lift the tracks — a fight the railroads carried to the United States Supreme Court in Vandalia Railroad v. South Bend, and lost — ended in the project finished on September 29, 1929: a seventeen-year grade-elevation program that raised the lines through downtown, ended the downtown grade crossings, and built Union Station — the city's second great terminal age in stone.

The interurban wrote the century's second rail chapter, and its dates in the popular telling want correction. The Chicago, Lake Shore and South Bend Railway began revenue service between Michigan City and South Bend on July 1, 1908; through its Kensington connection it opened passenger service between South Bend and Chicago in 1909, with through cars coupled to Illinois Central steam locomotives to reach downtown Chicago from June 1912; freight service followed in 1916. The line failed, and Samuel Insull bought the bankrupt property in 1925 and reorganized it as the Chicago South Shore and South Bend Railroad — the origin of the persistent error that the interurban "began running" in 1925. In truth the 1500-volt conversion Insull paid for let his trains run directly into Chicago's Randolph Street Terminal from August 1926. The South Shore Line runs still: passenger service passed to the Northern Indiana Commuter Transportation District in 1989, and the trains that once steamed the bend's streets now end at South Bend International Airport, running on electricity to Millennium Station in Chicago — the oldest thread of the city's connection to the lake, unbroken since 1908.

The city's own electric web was older than the South Shore and entirely its own. The Northern Indiana Railway, South Bend-based, grew from the South Bend Railway Company of 1885 — whose electric cars of October 1885 are argued, in the railfans' standard history of the line, to have been the first electric streetcars to run on a major public street in North America, a winter's experiment that failed and gave way to horsecars until electrification succeeded in 1890. By the new century the Northern Indiana's interurbans radiated from South Bend to Michigan City, Goshen and, through its Southern Michigan affiliate, St. Joseph, Michigan — racing the South Shore west out of town on tracks that ran parallel for miles — and its streetcars stitched the factory neighborhoods to downtown. The end came in the automobile's decade: the interurban lines were abandoned on June 1, 1934, and in June 1940 the last streetcars gave way to buses.

Sources:

1. City of South Bend reference history — the first locomotive of October 4, 1851 on the Michigan Southern and Northern Indiana; the track-elevation completion of September 29, 1929 and Union Station; Bendix's 1923 rail-line reason for choosing the city.
2. CERA Bulletin 107 and the Chicago South Shore & South Bend chronologies — first revenue service July 1, 1908; the Kensington & Eastern lease of April 4, 1909; Chicago passenger service from 1909; through cars behind Illinois Central steam from June 2, 1912; Insull's 1925 purchase and reorganization; the 1500-volt conversion of July 1926 and Randolph Street running from August 29, 1926.
3. Northern Indiana Commuter Transportation District — the assumption of South Shore passenger service on December 29, 1989.
4. Northern Indiana Railway references, including CERA Bulletin 132 — the South Bend Railway Company of 1885 and its October 1885 electric operation, argued as the first on a public street in North America; the interurban web to Michigan City, Goshen and St. Joseph, Michigan; the abandonment of the interurbans on June 1, 1934, and the last streetcars in June 1940.