The Notre Dame streetcar

1902–1940 · ONE LINE, TOLD WHOLE

The line: One city line has its own literature, and it earns it. The Notre Dame line existed because the university finally allowed it: in 1902 Father John Zahm, provincial superior of the Congregation of Holy Cross — "a man of the most progressive ideas," the South Bend Times called him — agreed to let the Indiana Railway Company connect the campus with downtown South Bend, and construction on the line began on 28 November of that year. Notre Dame Magazine's history of the line records that it would not be completed until 1907; ChicagoRailFan's route table enters the Notre Dame route's electric operation under 1905, and the two are carried here together — construction from 1902, the campus service the magazine dates to 1907, with the route record's 1905 standing as printed. The line ran up Notre Dame Avenue from downtown to the campus gates, about a ten-minute ride in the South Shore's own contemporary advertising, with streetcars direct to both Notre Dame and Saint Mary's stopping across the street from the South Shore station. On football Saturdays it was the city's surge line: the CERA album preserves the photograph of twenty-five cars lined up ready to pick up the crowd on the break of a Notre Dame football game in the fall of 1938.

The troubles: The line's documented life is a chronicle of its frictions, and Notre Dame Magazine tells it from the university's own record. In February 1908, when the streetcar to campus was just about a year old, two Notre Dame priests driving a horse-drawn sleigh were forced by heavy snow drifts to use part of the streetcar's track on Notre Dame Avenue; sleigh and streetcar collided, and Father Andrew J. Sammon was killed instantly, while the sleigh's driver, Father Timothy R. Murphy, was injured and survived. Eight years later the quarrel was with the students: tension had been mounting over the streetcars' size and their fees, students had taken to pulling the trolley pole off the wire and riding the car's sides and roof to dodge the fare, and the company brought in hired men to stop them. When a conductor allegedly struck a student with a switch hook, an irate group chased the motorman and conductor off their car, overturned it, and poured kerosene and gasoline over its wooden sides; by midnight, the Scholastic's 1949 account records, nothing was left but the metal wheels. The company's general manager demanded $5,000 of the university; President John J. Cavanaugh answered that Notre Dame was not responsible, and that the affair had been instigated by the company's own bruisers.

The end of the line: The Notre Dame car's last chapter came in October 1939, when a car ran off the end of the line and smashed into the pole that supported the trolley wire, sending the 600-volt wire crashing to the ground; two students aboard, who had run to the back of the car before the collision, were unhurt. The cause is told two ways in the university's own magazine, and both are carried here: the motorman, Morris Moffett, blamed a slight drizzle and wet leaves on the track; Jack Morrison of the class of 1943 remembered, decades later, that his friends had greased the track with pitch or oil as a prank, and that the pranksters were themselves aboard — which was how they knew to run to the back. Whatever the cause, the streetcar stopped running shortly thereafter; Morrison remembered the night as the last ride of the streetcar, and the service officially ended with the whole city system on 15 June 1940. "The trolley will rattle down Notre Dame Avenue for the last time in June," the Scholastic reported. "Progress marches on, and so the streetcar must go." When the students returned that autumn, the streetcar was gone.

Sources:

1. Notre Dame Magazine, "The brief, eventful life of the Notre Dame streetcar" — Father Zahm's agreement of 1902 and construction from 28 November 1902; completion in 1907; the February 1908 collision and Father Sammon's death; the 1916 riot from the Scholastic of 1949 and the $5,000 demand; the October 1939 derailment in both tellings; the official end on 15 June 1940.
2. ChicagoRailFan, South Bend transit routes — the Notre Dame route's electric operation entered under 1905; bus substitution 15 June 1940.
3. Central Electric Railfans' Association, Electric Railways of Indiana (Bulletin 104, 1960) — the South Shore's contemporary advertising of the streetcars to the campuses, and the twenty-five cars lined up for the football crowd, fall 1938.