Barns, shops and power

1885–1940 · THE PLANT BEHIND THE CARS

The car houses: ChicagoRailFan's facility record, compiled from the company's ground, gives the succession of the buildings the cars slept in. The first car house in South Bend may have stood on Jefferson Street west of Lafayette, and was probably used for about five years. By about 1890 the South Bend & Mishawaka Railway had its major car house at Columbia Street and Division Street — Division is today's Western Avenue — and it was Columbia Street that remained the principal base for the city cars for the rest of the streetcar era; a second house in Mishawaka, on First Street east of Main, closed before 1915. After 1910 a new car house and shops facility was built on Notre Dame Avenue south of Division, which mainly housed the interurban cars while most city cars continued to be based at Columbia Street. The Notre Dame Avenue plant outlived the rails: consolidated into it by 1940, it served the buses for seventy years more, as a later entry tells.

The fires: Twice in four years the Columbia Street house burned, and the CERA history tells both fires with their consequences. In February 1919 the car house burned and destroyed nine city cars; the shortage was made up through the purchase of cars from Akron, Ohio. On 26 February 1923 fire struck Columbia Street again, destroying eight more cars, a loss that left the company unable to maintain full normal service; the manager went to Cleveland and bought nine cars from the street railway there, and they were delivered over the interurban lines then linking to South Bend, under their own power, and were in service on the streets of South Bend three days later. The company's roster corroborates the emergency buying in its own columns: the car list records a block of secondhand cars purchased in 1922 from the Northern Ohio Traction & Light of Akron and from the Cleveland Railways, several of them rebuilt for one-man operation in 1923 — one-man operation itself coming to the city lines in the late 1920s.

The power: The streetcars' current was not, for most of the electric era, the railway's own. Engineering News reported in November 1906 that the Northern Indiana Railway Company was preparing plans for the erection of a large power plant in South Bend — but the plant the record actually documents is a contract. The South Bend News-Times of 7 August 1921, in a feature on the automatic transformer station the company had built east of South Bend — apparatus so novel that European engineers were coming to study it — states the arrangement plainly: the Indiana & Michigan Electric Company furnished the electric power used by the Chicago, South Bend & Northern Indiana for the operation of its traction system, from its hydraulic stations at Twin Branch above Mishawaka, at Elkhart and at Berrien Springs among others, under a contract made in 1909 to run fifteen years; "not for several years," by 1921, "has the traction company furnished any of its own electric power." The paper walks the reader through the conversion: current tapped from the transmission lines at about 5,000 volts, and brought down in the little automatic station — no attendant required — to the 400-volt pressure the trolley wire and the car motors used. The company's one power house of its own that the record names stood on its Southern Michigan affiliate's line at Scottdale, south of St. Joseph — interurban ground, and the Trains section's to tell; for the city lines, South Bend's streetcars ran on the electric company's water power, bought under the 1909 contract.

Sources:

1. ChicagoRailFan, South Bend transit facilities — the Jefferson Street car house; the Columbia Street and Division Street house from about 1890; the Mishawaka house on First Street, closed before 1915; the Notre Dame Avenue car house and shops built after 1910 and their division of work.
2. Central Electric Railfans' Association, Electric Railways of Indiana (Bulletin 104, 1960), South Bend narrative and Northern Indiana roster — the Columbia Street fires of February 1919 and 26 February 1923, the cars destroyed and the Akron and Cleveland purchases; the 1922 secondhand purchases from the Northern Ohio Traction & Light and the Cleveland Railways; one-man operation in the late 1920s.
3. Engineering News, 22 November 1906 — the Northern Indiana Railway Company's plans for a large power plant in South Bend.
4. South Bend News-Times, 7 August 1921 (Hoosier State Chronicles) — the Indiana & Michigan Electric Company's power contract of 1909, its hydro stations, and the automatic transforming station east of South Bend, described first-hand.
5. George K. Bradley, Northern Indiana Railway Inc., CERA Bulletin 132 (1998), contents — the Scottdale powerhouse on the Southern Michigan line.