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That no interurban ever reached Walkerton is banked, and is not retold here. What follows is the course of the two systems that came nearest — the local-equivalent history of the electric age at the county's edge. The Northern Indiana began as South Bend's street railway in 1885, and grew by merger: the Indiana Railway Company consolidation of 1898–99 strung the interurban web east — Elkhart to Goshen connected in 1898, Mishawaka to Elkhart in August 1899 — and in 1907 the property was remade as the Chicago, South Bend & Northern Indiana Railway, capitalized at $7,500,000, running Goshen–South Bend–Michigan City through Elkhart, Mishawaka and La Porte, with the La Porte–Michigan City line, built by the Chicago & South Shore Railway and completed in 1903, already in the fold from the Murdock syndicate's purchase of 1906. Its decline was as dated as its building: bankruptcy in 1927, reorganization as Northern Indiana Railway, Inc. in 1930, bankruptcy again at the end of 1931, the interurban lines abandoned in 1934, and the last streetcars giving way to buses in June 1940.
The South Shore, the line that survived, runs on a different frame. Founded 2 December 1901 as the Chicago & Indiana Air Line Railway, it began operations as the Chicago, Lake Shore & South Bend in 1908, South Bend to Hammond, on an alternating-current electrification no other American interurban matched; carload freight began in 1916 behind Baldwin-Westinghouse boxcab motors. Samuel Insull remade it: his Chicago, South Shore & South Bend Railroad was incorporated 23 June 1925 and bought the property six days later, converting the line to 1,500 volts direct current in 1926 so its trains could run through to Randolph Street in Chicago. Bankruptcy followed in 1933; the Little Joe freight motors came in 1949; the Chesapeake & Ohio took the property on 3 January 1967; and the last electric freight trip ran behind motor 803 on 31 January 1981. Then the authority era split the property in two, and the split is the point for this county's frame: Indiana created the Northern Indiana Commuter Transportation District in 1977 to keep the passenger trains alive, and when the railroad failed again in 1989, NICTD assumed the passenger service on 29 December 1989 and bought the track in December 1990, while the freight business passed to a new Chicago South Shore and South Bend Railroad under Anacostia Rail Holdings, which still runs freight over the district's line under trackage rights — and which on 3 February 2000 bought the 21-mile Kingsbury Line, the old Nickel Plate between Michigan City and Dillon, from Norfolk Southern. One projected chapter belongs to the test by its absence: no proposal for an interurban line to Walkerton itself was found in any source reached; the projected-but-unbuilt record that would carry one is Marlette's chapter on proposed lines in Electric Railroads of Indiana, named here as the settler.
Sources: CERA Bulletin 104, Electric Railways of Indiana, vol. 3 (Central Electric Railfans' Association; Internet Archive text, read November 2026); Weaver, Standard History of Elkhart County (1916), Northern Indiana Railway history; Chicago, South Shore & South Bend / NICTD succession record (railroad and district published histories, read November 2026); Kingsbury Line acquisition, 3 February 2000 (successor railroad record).