depots and railroads in fort wayne indiana

Depots and Railroads in Fort Wayne, Indiana

Posted August 14, 2007
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All Photos Copyright © 2004 - 2010 by Robert E Pence; use by permission only

I took all these photos except the vintage aerial, a Journal-Gazette file photo that I found in the archives of First Presbyterian Church. It's a
crop of about one quarter of an 8x10 image shot sometime before 1948.

A couple of years ago I fell in with a bunch of railroad historians at a get-together at Hillsdale, Michigan. One of our recent on-line
discussions concerned the Detroit Arrow, a Chicago-Detroit passenger train jointly operated by the Wabash and Pennsylvania Railroads.
The two lines crossed in Fort Wayne, and the shared operation allowed the two roads to compete with the New York Central and Grand
Trunk railroads for a lucrative piece of traffic. The Detroit Arrow once had one of the fastest schedules in North America, averaging 75mph
from end to end with its only stop in Fort Wayne where it changed engines, crews and operating railroads. I started digging through anything I
had on the two roads and their downtown depots and shared it with the group. I thought I might as well inflict it others too.

Some of these photos are hasty scans from old negatives and Ektachromes that haven't aged well. I still have more of this stuff unscanned
in the archives. One of these days…

First Amtrak Broadway Limited in Fort Wayne, May 1, 1971

Waiting to document the arrival of a train running 45 minutes late, I took a photo of the Wabash Depot that had seen its last day of passenger
service the day before.

The train gets a Penn Central freight engine to make up for a locomotive with engine problems.

1971 - Friday after Thanksgiving

1972 - Friday after Thanksgiving, headed to Chicago to shop

1973

Unused Wabash Depot

Pennsylvania Shops - Locomotive Erecting Hall

(Current site of main post office)

Old engine house

1979

The structure in the background is the former post office dock, on the north side of the tracks west of the depot

Junction Tower

The building in the background with the smokestacks is the powerhouse for the Taylor Street GE plant, built during WWII
to produce aircraft turbosuperchargers. The black water tower is Essex Wire, originally Dudlo Manufacturing, built to
produce wire for Model T Ford spark coils. Mom worked there for a few months right after high school, before she
decided to become a nurse. The brick buildings at the far left are the west end of the Broadway GE complex, along
College Street.

1980

In some of these photos you can see that the plaster at the lower edges of the vault is beginning to fail. As addicts stole
more of the copper flashing off the roof, easily accessible from track level, the problem accelerated. By the time Amtrak
service ended here, there were plywood partitions along the sides of the waiting room to keep people away from areas
where it was dangerous.

Tunnel leading from south end of depot to stairs up to track platforms.

Looking north from the platforms along Harrison Street.

Oops! I'd guess that if this trailer had fallen out where there was no canopy frame to bump it partway back onto the car,
it probably would have fallen off and made a heck of a mess. By 1980 the canopy roofs were leaky and rotten, and they
were removed to keep pieces from falling on waiting passengers. They were replaced with a short section of coated
steel panels near the stairwells. It was a sad and dreary place to wait for a train.

1982

1984

November, 1990

The last Amtrak train to serve Fort Wayne, Train # 40, the eastbound Broadway Limited, ran in November, 1990. These are photos taken at
the station on Baker Street that night.

The station, in somewhat unkempt condition at the inception of Amtrak in 1971, had received little in the
way of improvement, and to a great degree had continued to deteriorate. The trash-strewn
express/baggage elevator stands open to the elements and vandals.

Thieves had stolen the copper flashing from the roof, easily accessible from trackside, allowing water to penetrate and destroy the
decorative plaster work on the ceiling vault. The arched windows at trackside had been mostly covered with plywood to protect them from thrown
rocks, and neighborhood vermin had tagged the exposed glass. Plywood barriers kept waiting passengers away from areas where
they might be injured by falling/fallen plaster.

Note the sign on the station bench in the foreground. You'll see it later.

An overhead drainage system had been improvised to intercept and redirect the
water leaking through into the tunnel from the platform above. Plywood blocks off
one set of stairs leading to a no-longer-used platform.

Plywood on the upper walls covers the remnants of glass-block windows pulverized by vandals, who also ripped down and destroyed the
handrail on the right side of the steps. Stairwells originally were open at platform level, but in an effort to keep out vandals they were closed off
with glass doors which were immediately shattered. The glass was replaced with plywood with plexiglas inserts, which got tagged and battered.

In some publication or on-line blog I saw a photo of the train arriving at an eastern station, with the sign still attached. The caption said that the
sign had been attached by Amtrak Chicago coach yard workers. Somebody must have just made that up; here's proof:

2004

The building was in deplorable shape by the time an architectural firm bought it
and renovated it into office space. The spacious central hall is available with
catering for private events.

They did a first-class job, even restoring the windows that backlight the stained-
glass panels in the vaulted ceiling. Those windows had been bricked up
years ago.

2007

The station backs up against an area that is seriously "the wrong side of the tracks." The razor wire was put up to
keep thieves and vandals off the roof where they could try to break in through windows, spraypaint, and perform other
acts of mischief.

Westbound traffic on the NS side.

I worked on the top floor of this building until I quit GE in 1988. When the
westbound Broadway ran on time, I'd often see it pass as I walked to work from
my home about a mile west.

Even when the station was still in use, the platforms were vandal magnets. The handrails were broken out of the
stairwells and the glass-block windows were smashed. After Amtrak installed locking doors at the tops of the stairwells,
the plexiglass got broken out so they put plywood over them. Some time in the past couple of years, the railroad
bulldozed the stairwell walls into the wells and collapsed the concrete roofs on top or them, sealing them off.

Added August 15, 2007:

Here's a crop from an aerial that I shared earlier. Looking at the automobiles that I can identify, it looks as though it
may have been taken during WWII or even earlier. It shows three paths crossing between the PRR eastbound platform
and the Wabash; one just west of the signal bridge, one a little west of that, and one just west of the water tanks. I went
on site this morning to look it over, and mostly buried under ballast rock and overgrown vegetation there appears to
be a remnant of what might have been a platform on the north side of the Wabash tracks. In today's litigious
environment it seems unusual for railroads to permit passengers to cross active mains, but times were different then.
Maybe that's how they did it.

My earliest recollection of the PRR station goes back to about 1947 when at the age of seven or eight I went to
Chicago with Dad. The station now looks pretty much as at did then, although by the time of that trip it had already
been altered with fluorescent lights. The buzz of those lights echoing through the cavernous space was one of the
things that always triggered that memory when I went there to catch a train in later years. The pedestrian underpass to
the platforms intersected with two stairwells; the one nearest the depot went to the westward platform, and the one at
the far end went to the eastward platform, from which passengers might have used the foot paths in the photo to cross
over to/from the Wabash.

August 15, 2007

Looking east on Grand Street toward Calhoun. The Wabash depot stood on the left, with waiting room and ticket
offices on the second story at track level.

Looking west from Calhoun Street. The stairway is the same one shown in the previous shot.

The Wabash depot stood on the left.

Looking west. The PRR depot and ruins of its platforms are obscured by the ailanthus and other overgrown trash
vegetation on the right.

This is where I think the path west of the water tanks might have come through. The water tank footings are hidden in
the thicket on the right. The drive going off to the left goes down off the elevation to Fairfield Avenue across from the
GE plant.

This railing is on the south side of the Wabash tracks, across from where the path from the PRR station might have
come through.

Standing on the Wabash overpass above Harrison Street looking at the PRR overpass and beyond.

Sidewalk on Wabash Harrison Street overpass, with part of the Wabash freight house visible at the far left.

Wabash freight house.

Where we've begun and ended our rail travels since 1990

The Amtrak stop at Waterloo, Indiana (pop. 2,040)serves Fort Wayne. It's at the intersection of Indiana 427 and US 6, 20 miles north:

Shelter walls don't extend all the way to the floor, and there are neither doors nor infra-red heaters. If you want heat while you wait for your (probably
late) train, sit in your car with the engine running. You can get a cup of coffee at the gas station two or three blocks north. Don't slip and fall on the
crushed-stone surface of the steepy-banked parking strip while getting out of your car.

That was the westbound platform. Eastbound trains try to line up with a relatively narrow track-level strip of asphalt that serves as a path to the
platform. Sometimes they miss, and you step off into snow-covered ballast rock:

Nice, huh?