Last Electric Car Leaves Forest Park

The last electric car has officially departed Forest Park and the old Indiana Transportation Museum site, drawing to a close 50 years of traction preservation at that site. The dubious honor went to Lackawanna 4328, a standard high-roof MU trailer built in 1917, which was acquired by the Hoosier Valley Railroad Museum. At HVRM it joins two much newer mainline MU cars, Illinois Central "Highliners," as well as a pair of privately-owned South Shore coaches. There are still three electric cars owned by ITM on the PNAERC roster, all of them Lackawanna MU cars identical to 4328 (except that they're in much worse condition), but they're stored on a siding in Cicero, Indiana to the north of Noblesville. Rumor has it that the owner of that siding - recall that ITM has never owned a square foot of land, so even the equipment they own that wasn't seized by the city of Noblesville is on land owned by someone else - has sued ITM so those cars may be leaving at some point in the near future as well. Of course there's plenty of steam road equipment still in Forest Park too, but that collection has begun to leave as well, starting with an L&N diner moved to Tennessee this week.

ITM started out as the Indiana Museum of Transportation and Communication, or IMOTAC, and initially its collection was heavily traction-oriented. The organization's first car, whose acquisition predated the move to Forest Park by a few years, was Chicago Aurora & Elgin 308; public operation was for many years limited to electric cars; and during the museum's first decade only a few pieces of mainline railroad equipment were obtained. But by the early 1980s, with the ability to operate over the old Nickel Plate mainline into Indianapolis and the leasing of NKP Mikado 587, the focus changed to running mainline steam and diesel excursions. The most successful and long-lasting of these were the Fair Trains to the state fairgrounds and by the early 2000s the museum's preservation mission had largely become secondary to maintaining the Fair Train operation. The last electric car ran around 1999 and after that the traction collection languished until the museum lost its lease on the land in the park last year. Offers by the city of Noblesville to give ITM a year to evacuate were met by lawsuits and an eviction notice was served in July. ITM as an organization still exists, with some equipment in poor condition in Cicero and a few other pieces extracted in early July scattered around the state, but it is gone from Forest Park forever.