South Bend Public Transit: The Streetcars, the Buses and the Carriage Trade

Transit · the streetcars, the buses and the carriage trade

South Bend has been carried for hire since 1885, and it has been carried, for most of that time, by one continuous succession of operators. A street railway chartered in the January of 1885 ran the city's first horse cars that spring, startled the country that fall with one of the first electric streetcars ever run on a public street, and then settled into half a century of electric operation under a line of consolidations that ended as the Northern Indiana Railway. The same company that ran the streetcars ran the buses that replaced them — South Bend is the one city on its system where that is true — and when the private succession finally failed, as it was failing everywhere, the two cities it served took the property public in 1968 as the South Bend Public Transportation Corporation, the buses the city knows as Transpo. The streetcars ended on 15 June 1940. The buses have run since, through a downtown trolley-replica episode, a natural-gas fleet, a regional plan, and the funding cuts of 2026. This section tells the city's own carriage whole: the horse cars, the electric experiment, the system at its extent, the barns and the power, the strike and the jitneys, the Notre Dame line, the conversion, the private bus years, the public corporation, the fares and the riders, the present state, and the cabs that worked alongside it all.