The South Shore street track to downtown South Bend, with a station stop by the Lasalle Hotel, was a victim of 1970s urban renewal that demolished much of downtown.
Prior to 1990s move to the airport, South Bend's station was an ugly, filthy, dangerous-neighborhood, puke-pit cinderblock building near the former Bendix plant, shared with Amtrak. It was not a safe place to leave a car unattended, even during the day. Amtrak still uses this station, although I think they've cleaned it up a little and given it a better paint job.
Trains to and from the West use a covered, high-level platform on the east end of the terminal building, reached by a circuitous route that was built to take advantage of existing freight ROW. Plans are being finalized to reroute the trains directly into a new station on the west side of the terminal, eliminating a couple of miles of winding, traffic-infested slow track and shaving substantial time off the schedule.
South Shore is running acceptance tests on 14 new bi-level gallery cars built on the same order with the Metra Electric cars shown here at 57th Street. The new cars are expected to go into service in Spring, initially running on off-peak trains. These cars have 111 walk-over seats, compared with 74 fixed-directional seats in the single-level cars. The gallery cars cannot be train-lined with the existing single-level cars.
South Shore Freight, a separate private entity, leases use of South Shore track. Among their major commodities are steel coils from the mills along Lake Michigan and coal for the NIPSCO (Northern Indiana Public Service Company) power plant at Michigan City. Judging from the Union Pacific dedicated power that often handles the coal trains, I'd speculate it's Powder River Basin coal from Wyoming.
