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The test asked for a grade or elevation fight in the legal record — cases, a viaduct, a settlement. It found a fight, and the fight was not about elevation at all. It was about signals, and it went to the Indiana Supreme Court twice. The north–south road through town was by then the New York, Chicago & St. Louis — the Nickel Plate. On 5 September 1930 the Walkerton town board adopted resolutions declaring the railroad's crossings at Fourth, Fifth, Seventh and Eighth Streets dangerous, and requiring the company to install electric flash-light alarm signals at all four by 15 February 1931, under a penalty of ten dollars a day for each crossing left unprotected. The signals were not installed. On 14 December 1931 the town sued, in four paragraphs claiming $3,000 apiece.
The law the case made is the print of it. The railroad's demurrer raised the question whether Indiana's statute, which spoke of "electric gongs or alarm signals," could reach the newer flash-light signal at all; the Supreme Court held that it could, reversing the demurrer judgment on 6 March 1936 (Town of Walkerton v. New York, Chicago & St. Louis Railroad Co., 210 Ind. 175, 200 N.E. 243). Retried, the case split: a directed verdict for the railroad on the first three paragraphs, for the town on the fourth, with judgment of $3,020 — and on 31 January 1939 the Supreme Court affirmed (215 Ind. 206, 18 N.E.2d 799, Shake, J.). No viaduct, no elevation, no grade separation for Walkerton appears in any record reached: on ground this flat, with crossings at grade then as the banked FRA article finds them now, the town's one recorded fight over its crossings was fought over how they should warn, not whether they should rise — and the town won the point of law and one paragraph of four.
Sources: Town of Walkerton v. New York, Chicago & St. Louis Railroad Co., 210 Ind. 175, 200 N.E. 243 (1936), and 215 Ind. 206, 18 N.E.2d 799 (1939) — case texts and summaries read November 2026; banked at-grade crossing record in Transportation.