page_title: Indiana Railroad
section_title: Inherited rolling stock
hierarchical_section_title: Indiana Railroad / Inherited rolling stock
caption_attribution_description: English: Fort Wayne &amp; Wabash Valley 504, preserved at the Illinois Railway Museum.
context_page_description: The Indiana Railroad was the last of the typical Midwestern United States interurban lines. It was formed in 1930-31 by combining the operations of the five major interurban systems in central Indiana into one entity. The predecessor companies came under the control of Midland Utilities, owned by Samuel Insull. It was Insull's plan to transform the Indiana interurban network into a new Indiana Railroad by modernizing the profitable routes and abandoning the unprofitable ones. With the onset of the Great Depression, the Insull empire collapsed and the Indiana Railroad was left with a decaying infrastructure and little hope for overcoming the growing competition of the automobile for passenger business and the truck for freight business. The IR faced bankruptcy in 1933, and receiver Bowman Elder was designated to run the company. Payments on bonded debt were suspended. Elder was able to keep the system virtually intact for four years, and IR operated about 600 miles of interurban lines throughout Indiana during this period.
context_section_description: IR inherited a very large fleet of interurban cars from its various predecessor companies, totaling perhaps 100-150 interurban cars (of which about 60 were retained), probably 200 or so streetcars (of which about 150 were retained), around 50 pieces of freight equipment and about 55 work cars of various types.
  The interurban cars varied considerably in age and design.  A number of pre-1910 very large arch-windowed wooden combines that had survived in service on ISC and THI&E were disposed of within the first couple of years of IR's existence, leaving a fleet made up predominantly of heavy steel single-ended combines. There were about half a dozen 400 class ISC combines, 30 UTC steel combines (including 15 modern cars only five years old), and nine of Interstate IPS's handsome heavyweight combines, parlor and sleeping cars. A few of these former Interstate cars were still operated by a British Columbia railroad in the 1990s. (Classic Trains Magazine, Sept 2008.)
  The city cars, excluding earlier wooden types that were scrapped, consisted mainly of single-truck Birney cars inherited from UTC and THI&E.  The only exceptions were a handful of double-truck cars left over from UTC and from IPS's suburban Louisville operations.
  The freight and work equipment was a hodgepodge of mainly homebuilt designs, outdated passenger cars converted for alternate use, and secondhand equipment.  Most of this equipment was quite old, but even some equipment dating to before 1905 remained in IR's employ for years. Some of the retired passenger coaches that were in better condition were rebuilt into box motors and utility cars.
caption: This Fort Wayne & Wabash Valley all wood heavy interurban is typical of the numerous pre-1910 wood combines which were inherited by IR.
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