The third railroad: the Three I and the Kankakee Belt, 1894

THE TRANSPORT TRILOGY, THIRD BEAT — AND ITS UNBUILDING

The last railroad came as a freight road and left as a diamond in a crossing: the Indiana, Illinois & Iowa Railroad — the "Three I" — had built westward from Streator, Illinois, to North Judson, Indiana, in 1881, and its extension on to South Bend, run through North Liberty and Walkerton, was completed in 1894 (American Rails, Kankakee Belt Route). Howard, writing in 1907, names the road in town with one eye wrong: "the Three I, otherwise the Chicago, Illinois & Southern" — the company was the Chicago, Indiana & Southern, and Howard's "Illinois" prints as his error, flagged and uncorrected in his text. His railroad chapter gives the road's character exactly: it came "to South Bend, by way of Walkerton and North Liberty," it was "distinctively a freight railroad," "a Chicago belt line" built to move through freight around the city rather than into it, and it "has since passed under control of the Lake Shore railroad company" (Howard, p. 240) — the New York Central system, in whose Illinois Division the line was worked as the Kankakee Belt Route. The belt's 1964 Indiana interchange list fixes Walkerton's place in the mature system: at Walkerton the Belt met the Baltimore and Ohio and the Nickel Plate (Kankakee Belt Route, NYC Illinois Division interchange list, 1964). The succession ran Penn Central in 1968 and Conrail in 1976, and the belt's eastern end did not survive the Conrail era as track: by the photographic record of December 2004, between South Bend and Wheatfield the rails in the Walkerton crossing were "all that remains of the Kankakee Belt track" — the line lifted on both sides of town, its diamond still set in the north–south road it crossed (monon.org, Kankakee Belt photo record, 2004). Norfolk Southern owns the surviving Kankakee Belt to the west, which the Elkhart & Western Railway leases and operates. The town thus keeps two of its three railroads in service — the CSX east–west line and the Norfolk Southern north–south line — owned by Norfolk Southern, leased and operated by the Elkhart & Western Railway — the old Pe-wee road's descendant — and wears the third as a scar across both. The corporate record at depth is Trains'.