I Remember...The Railroads  

by John William Houghton
published in the Culver Citizen ca.1974-1974

Before beginning the substance of this column, I should pause to warn historians and journalists that these writings are neither "fish nor fowl nor good red herring." I'm no newspaperman, to begin with, and my intention, in any case, is to report in this space not history, but stories about Culver as people tell them to me. I won't let facts interfere with a good story.

Culver almost didn't have a railroad. In 1883, the Vandalia Railroad company planned to extend its trackage to South Bend, by way of Walkerton. The present route was adopted because the citizens of Center Township voted a $30,000 subsidy for the railroad and because eight Plymouth men who owned lake property in Culver agreed to give the railroad a right of way through their land. Track was complete to Plymouth in 1884, so Culver must have seen its first train about that time.

During the seventy-odd years it was here, the railroad was the center of many episodes of Culver 's history: one of the stranger incidents took place about sixty years ago, when a train derailment spilled several cars (one of them carrying beans, and another corn) onto the lake ice, somewhere between Willow Point and the Outlet. Carl Stubbs told me some of the story:

"The grade wasn't quite as wide as it is now, the road was way over where part of the grade was. It was dirt, right down at the water level. When the lake was high, you could even drive in the water along it. Some telephone posts had to be set in the lake to get through there. That's been filled in. So the train didn't have far to go to get onto the ice. Of course, the shore in there, I imagine, was pretty well protected, and I imagine the ice froze clear to the ground. But it did hold the train up. I've seen the pictures, too."

Oil spills are rare enough on Indiana lakes, but I'm willing to bet the great Maxinkuckee corn spill is one of a kind I've always felt a certain curiosity about abandoned things, wondering what old tools were used for, or who lived in houses long since deserted. Walking along the railroad always stirs up this curiosity in me, and I have, in this way, found out about the Arlington station, and the turntable, and even a canal cut under the railway to serve as an ice-house. I think these bits of knowledge made me a little cocky, for when Bob Kyle recently mentioned to me that a tavern once stood near the Culver railroad station, I immediately concluded that this tavern was the answer to one of my pet questions: what was the spur of track west of the station used for? Even as Mr. Kyle described the Kreutzberger establishment, I began to picture that short piece of track filled by two brightly colored boxcars f ull of beer, waiting to be unloaded by eager customers of the saloon. This made such a good story, in fact, that I had provided it with several embellishments before my great uncle, Lester Houghton, told me that my track actually served as a baggage depot, in the days when all of the present station was needed to accommodate Culver 's heavy tourist trade. I was crushed at the loss of such a fine story as mine had become, but I did, at least, salvage from the wreckage an idea for my next column: I Remember... the Out-of-Towners. See you then.