BY KEITH BENMAN, Times of Northwest Indiana
kbenman@nwitimes.com
It once brought strong-armed men from their homes to the steel mills. It brought city slickers from Chicago for a day at the beach. It took a generation off to war and brought them back.
The South Shore, for much of its history a down-at-the-heels interurban railroad, has had an outsized impact on the region's psyche and spirit.
"It has been around and through so much," said Steve McShane, curator of the Calumet Regional Archives.
In fact, it has been around for exactly 100 years, with most counting the South Shore's birth from the day it spanned the 68 miles from Hammond to South Bend.
The Midwest Railroad Research Center of the Indiana Historical Society is celebrating the railroad's centennial this week, with events at South Bend Regional Airport, which is the South Bend terminus.
The railroad has a rich and fabled history, McShane said. In 1911, the Prairie Club of Chicago used the South Shore for regular excursions into the wilds of Northwest Indiana's Lake Michigan shoreline.
A goal to establish a national park there fell short, but the group was successful in establishing a Dunes state park. It was left to a later generation to establish the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore.
"During the Progressive Era, they saw these outdoor excursions as a way to escape the demoralizing effects of the urban areas," McShane said.
At one time, it would be hard to find a resident of a northern Lake County city who had not ridden on the South Shore, usually on a regular basis.
But every boom on the railroad was followed by a bust. It went bankrupt in both 1933 and 1938.
During World War II, it carried its all-time record of 6 million passengers per year. But with the growth of automobile travel and the opening of major interstate highways in the 1950s, its fortunes again flagged.
South Shore General Manager Gerald Hanas, who has been with the railroad since the late 1970s, is the first to acknowledge the ride to today has been a bumpy one.
Current South Shore operator Northern Indiana Commuter Transportation District was formed in 1977, after the railroad's private operator attempted to discontinue all passenger service.
When NICTD got involved, the railroad's passenger cars dated back to 1926, Hanas said. There were days in the winter when only one or two trains operated per day. Converted coal stoves cast what little heat there was in winter. Gas air conditioners struggled through the summer to give riders a whiff of cool air.
"It was pretty nip and tuck," Hanas said. "We like to say if we did it all again, we would just shut the railroad down for four years."
It took a mighty act of political will to save the passenger railroad. Communities and legislators pulled together and came up with federal revenue-sharing funds to help fund the railroad. The state of Indiana also kicked in funds and federal matching funds were obtained.
The South Shore is on a solid footing today, annually carrying more than 4 million passengers and splitting its revenue about evenly between fares and government subsidies.
It also is more than halfway through a $124 million upgrade of its system, the largest capital investment since industrial titan Samuel Insull built up the line in the 1920s.
It now dreams of a bigger future, where travel times from South Bend to Chicago are cut by as much as a half-hour and new extensions are built to Lowell in Lake County and Valparaiso in Porter County.
"The theme now is economic development and trying to make all of Northwest Indiana, both urban and suburban, comparable with the rest of suburban Chicago with respect to rail access," Hanas said.
Some see the South Shore extension as another chapter in the railroad's ability to adapt to changing times, albeit not always smoothly.
"It's interesting the South Shore has recognized the demographic shift to suburban areas," McShane said. "The idea seems to be to go where the people are."