Garrett, IN: B&O Depot and Roundhouse

More about the B&O in Garrett, IN, is here.

3rd of 6 posted by Marty Bernard
 Garrrett, IN Depot, 1989, Karl Miller photo.
1st of 6 posted by Marty Bernard
CSX Garrett, IN depot in May 1989, Karl Miller photo.
David L White: Looks like there's some grips setting on the benches, crews waiting for their train to show up.
Darren Reynolds posted
B&Os "G" Office Garrett, Indiana ("G" Office was located Inside the  train station)
Dennis DeBruler

Marty Bernard documents this as a 1989 Karl Miller photo, https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=2982762042015713&set=pcb.2982762175349033

 

Thomas Bowers posted
Garrett, Ind 1981
Raymond Shields: At this time I was the road foreman at Willard and got to run this engine.

Scott Griffith posted
Awesome pic of our brother terminal in Garrett Indiana were I hired out

I cannot reconcile this photo with a 1951 aerial photo because in the photo there is a street, not a track on the backside of the roundhouse.

Scott Griffith posted
One for the Garrett guys

Scott Griffith posted
 know not B&OCT but Garret roadhouse , some of us worked out there.
Rick Kessler My Dad always said that the reason he never went on the road was because he had my Mom here near East Chicago and then he would need a girlfriend out east. Two women would be just to hard to juggle.....

Michael Gentis posted two photos with the comment: "Payday at the roundhouse and workers at the cinder pit B&O shops Garrett, IN. Ca. 1920."

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Richard Shulby commented on Michael's post
Apparently the "old" or 1st roundhouse. Here's a postcard of the "new" roundhouse presumably from 1915- design details would support that date range. The old one was apparently just west of the new one, per an index map (no detail) on an 1895 Sanborn map. Thanks for posting!

1957 Garrett Quadrangle @ 1:24,000

Michael Gentis posted two photos with the comment: "The original roundhouse at the B&O shops Garrett, IN. The second depicts the aftermath of a fire at the second roundhouse and turntable 1961."

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Rick Shilling posted
Undated Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Roundhouse, Turntable, Shops and Yard at Garrett, Indiana.
Dennis A. Livesey: The date would be a few years after steam. That would have been about 1957. So maybe 1963? Brent Bierce: This area looks very dirty even for a railroad. My grandpa worked for the B&O and retired CSX in 1987. He always talked about how the B&O equipment was never taken care of. He said they loved getting stuff in the Chessie era from WM equipment because they took care of their equipment way better than the B&O. [There are several comments about the polluted ground.]

Ghost Rails and Forgotten Highways posted

The B&O Put a Town Where an 1875 Locomotive Ran Out of Water

There was nothing there. The railroad picked the spot, bought fifty acres, platted a town in 1875 and named it after John W. Garrett, who was president of the Baltimore & Ohio at the time.

The National Register file is specific about why that spot: the site was selected on the basis of how far a locomotive of 1875 could travel east from Chicago before it needed to refill its boiler. Not a crew district, not a coal supply. Water.

Then they built the thing the town existed for. Car repair shops, headquarters of the B&O's Chicago Division, and it kept growing until the complex covered close to ninety acres with thirty-eight company buildings and sixteen miles of yard track inside it. John King, the B&O's first vice-president, personally put up a commercial block downtown in 1875, in a town that was months old. By 1913 five thousand people lived in Garrett and two thousand men worked in the shops. The nomination puts it plainly: virtually every household in Garrett has some association with the railroad, sometimes through several generations.

Here is the part that does not go the way you expect. The big car shops closed in 1921 - thirty years before the diesels everybody blames. The division headquarters went in the early sixties. The last roundhouse came down in 1968. The final Amtrak train called on September 9, 1995 and the station was demolished that same year.

And Garrett is still there. CSX still runs the main line through it. The 2020 census counted 6,542 people, which is about fifteen hundred more than lived there when the shops were at their peak. It stopped being a railroad town and became a town near Fort Wayne, and it never emptied out.

Did your people work the Garrett shops?

The tidy version of this story is that dieselization killed Garrett, and the federal record does not support it. The shops that employed most of the town were substantially shut in 1921. What followed was a slow withdrawal over about fifty years, in a town that outlived it.

Paul Stumpff: They would have probably stopped once or twice to refill the tender with water. Hundred miles dealt with engine change because of needing servicing and crew change.

Justin Newhall: This isn’t quite right. First, they’d be refilling the tender, not the boiler. And an 1875 steam engine couldn’t even travel that far on a tank of water. It was closer to 50 miles on flat track. So there’d be more stops for water before Chicago.

Greg Alexander commented on the above post

Garrett HS still honors their origin by using the nickname Railroaders.

Mark Hensinger 0321: Greg Alexander John Hutton painted that beautiful mural. Also, my football coach and athletic director.

A talented and good man of the community. Always consider him my friend.