ARGOS, IN — The ground trembled as the unmistakable “TWEEET-TWEEEET” of a true American icon echoed across Marshall County as Union Pacific’s Big Boy 4014, the world’s largest operating steam locomotive, rolled into Argos for a brief stop. Standing at an immense 132 feet long and weighing more than 1.2 million pounds, the mechanical marvel drew thousands of onlookers who lined the tracks for a glimpse of living history.

The engine’s historic visit, replete with historic cars in tow, was part of a monumental coast-to-coast tour celebrating the United States semisquincentennial—the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding.

Across the landscape, the spirit of community was on full display. On properties both large and small, residents proudly placed American flags along their property lines. Traffic backed up for miles along country roads as diverse crowds gathered. Amish families arrived by horse and buggy, local farmers drove in on tractors, and others arrived on bicycles and motorcycles. Vans filled with elderly citizens parked alongside groups of excited young people, all eager to witness the mighty engine roaring into this short whistle-stop. 

As people walked along the gravel shoulders of the country roads toward the tracks, an impromptu festival of storytelling broke out. Neighbors and strangers alike visited warmly, sharing personal memories of rail travel, swapping family histories, and recalling the distinct sights and sounds of iconic trains from the past. Conversations drifted to historic whistle-stops by presidential candidates, legendary celebrity sightings, and even a fond recollection of the Ripley’s Believe It or Not train stop in nearby Niles, Michigan, during the late 1970s or early 1980s—a spectacle I vividly remember witnessing alongside Sam Corl and my grandma Elsie.

When the behemoth locomotive concluded its brief stop to head onward toward Fort Wayne, various towns in Ohio, and ultimately its celebratory destination in Philadelphia, the crowds lingered, reluctant to leave. The air remained thick with reminiscence. Flying both the United States and Indiana flags proudly from its massive frame, the engine was given a spectacular send-off as thousands of spectators shouted, applauded, and cheered the lumbering beast as it forged eastward along the rails.

In a world fractured by modern divisions, the sight of this historic titan provided a rare, unifying moment for people of every background and political stripe. Standing together in shared wonder, the crowd did more than just watch a train pass; they paid homage to a definitive masterpiece of American engineering. Forged by the grit, sweat, and labor of workers from Schenectady, New York, this World War II-era relic proved that the iron tracks of our history still possess the unique power to tie us together. 

If you want to catch Big Boy 4014 headed back west, you’ll have the opportunity to see it at a brief whistle stop in Knox, Indiana, on Thursday, July 16, 2026. The train visit is currently planned for 12:30 PM Central Time (note CENTRAL TIME, so 1:30 PM South Bend time), but you should check the schedule closer to the date as changes do occur. 

You can check the schedule at: https://www.up.com/about-us/history/steam/schedule

After it wraps up the stop in Knox, the train will continue heading southwest toward Illinois and its next major public exhibition layout in St. Louis a few days later. It’s bound to draw another massive crowd, so plan for some early road closures if you are aiming to catch the return leg

© 2026 Brian S Collier. All opinions are those of the author. The author reserves all Rights and copyrights. To request permission to reprint any or all of this article, contact info@redresssouthbend.com. 

This piece was written with the help of Generative AI. While real in-person reporting is most prominent, AI was utilized to gather specs, edit, and format some parts of this piece. 

Reprinted with permission of the author by Redress South Bend.

All opinions, research, and views in this piece are attributed to the author and are not necessarily the thoughts or opinions of Redress South Bend. 

There is a straight, clear line running from a Penn High School student reporter using a racial slur during a live broadcast of a Riley High School basketball game to our community’s fifteen-year failure to disclose the South Bend Police Department tapes.

That same dark line can be tied directly to the Democratic nominee for St. Joseph County Sheriff, Scott Ruszkowski, in his role as South Bend Police chief, characterizing officer, Samuel Chaput, violently pinning a young girl to the ground at a downtown McDonald’s as “minimal force.” An onlooker’s video clearly showed no attempt to de-escalate, yet the Police Review Board offered a non-decision, and police spokesperson Ashley O’Chapp openly complained about the “unpaid time” it took to provide public answers, absolutely misunderstanding her salaried position. The lack of police civic compassion was palpable. The stance was purely defensive, confusing “Serve and Protect” with protecting police jobs and political aspirations rather than the citizens of our community.

The line traces directly to the 2019 police shooting of Eric Logan, a Black man, by a white officer whose body camera was not operating. Shielded by qualified immunity, the officer was cleared by a special prosecutor, and the family’s wrongful death lawsuit was ultimately dismissed by a federal judge in 2021. Today, that line runs through our school districts’ discipline statistics, where the hollow process of “further study” is once again underway in South Bend.

Watch the line meander backward to September 20, 1968, and the mass walkout at Washington High School, organized by the Student Organization for Unity and Leadership (S.O.U.L.) over the lack of Black student representation. Their protest became a textbook case study in de facto segregation—schools that integrated physically, but not in the systemic ways that actually mattered to families and their educational futures.

You can see it as a yellow line. Decades after Indiana outlawed school segregation in the 1940s and the Supreme Court ordered desegregation with “all deliberate speed,” South Bend had to be sued into compliance. A 1980 federal lawsuit explicitly charged the city with purposefully maintaining a segregated system. To avoid litigation, South Bend implemented a busing program that forced Black students into significantly longer commutes. Those same yellow lines fueled “white flight,” driving the rapid growth of surrounding suburban townships away from integrating schools.

Follow the line further back to Black residents paying taxes for public facilities they were legally barred from using, like the Engman Public Natatorium in the 1920s and 30s. Make the line bright orange to show public parks and schoolyards stripped of basketball courts in predominantly Black neighborhoods, or bright green to trace the historical lack of park upgrades, sidewalks, curbs, and canopy trees in those same areas.

This historical throughline is mapped with devastating clarity in the March 4, 2026, report from the city’s Reparations Committee, available here. Despite recent pushback from at least one city official attempting to restrict copies of the document, the report lays bare a well-researched history of localized oppression. These lines must be preserved if we ever hope for change.

Instead, these police tapes continue to draw battle lines. They previously halted Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign, forcing him to return home to confront long-standing racialized violence in our community. Today, those very tapes face total destruction by order of the St. Joseph County Court.

As a community, we must draw a line in the sand and not stand for the destruction of these tapes. Our Common Council, local historical associations, and national truth and reconciliation groups must use every legal and creative mechanism available to preserve these recordings. Whether by passing local preservation ordinances, reading the transcripts into the public record during council sessions, or drafting a preservation law to release the tapes on a particular date, we must work within the law to ensure the community is not locked out of the conversation.

It is vital that these tapes survive. We must hear what was said so we know what needs to be apologized for, what retraining is required, and what justice we must continue to demand. We must learn where we are as a community so that we can grow, heal, and ultimately transcend.

Sojourner Truth reportedly said, “I cannot read, but I can hear.” We need the chance to hear these tapes to understand how deep the wounds in our community run, and exactly who has worked to hide them. Like the broadcasted slurs of a high school student, these tapes diagnose the systemic disease that continues to divide us. We can trace these lines to fix the problem or look away while the courts permanently bury a monument to systemic injustice.

Before we can draw new, bold lines for our community’s future, we must untangle the web of lines from our past. We must hear the tapes. To destroy them tells our youth—at PHM and across the region—that we intend to turn a deaf ear to institutional racism. It proves we are more interested in pointing to the sawdust in one another’s eyes than removing the straight-line plank from our own, an hypocrisy that only allows racial violence and prejudice to persist.

© 2026 Brian S Collier. All opinions are those of the author. The author reserves all Rights and copyrights. To request permission to reprint any or all of this article, contact info@redresssouthbend.com. 

Reprinted with permission of the author by Redress South Bend.

All opinions, research, and views in this piece are attributed to the author and are not necessarily the thoughts or opinions of Redress South Bend.

“Where was that park where we had family reunions? It had a little beach.” This came in our sibling chat the other day. 

“We went kayaking from there with your friends from New Mexico one time,” chimed in another brother. 

“I don’t remember that,” the youngest brother chirped. “I didn’t go anywhere.” This classic lament from the fourth-born, who is so much younger that he barely existed for many of our stories. Still, despite being an “Irish twin,” he confidently claims—without proof—that he was the only planned child born among the five of us.

Recently, my brothers and I shared a text thread with some photos from family reunions at the St. Joseph County Ferrettie/Baugo Park. We remembered a small beach there that connected to the St. Joseph River. We also recalled other times kayaking from Baugo Park into the river and places beyond. However, when we looked for those spots on Google Earth, we could not find them; it seemed that Baugo Bay in Osceola was no more (note that you can still canoe and kayak from the park, but not in quite the same way, and less and less so all the time).  

For over a century, Baugo Bay has been a vital ecological and recreational haven. Today, it is literally disappearing.

Decades of suspect drainage management and unchecked runoff from the Baugo Creek watershed have turned this thriving aquatic ecosystem into a cautionary tale of environmental neglect. As massive amounts of sediment and organic matter flow into the bay, thick layers build up on the floor, choking out the water’s depth. When that sediment reaches the surface, vegetation takes root, trees grow, and permanent islands form. Some of these problems are exacerbated by the aging and partially neglected dams nearby. 

According to the local non-profit Save Baugo Bay, Inc., the Indiana Department of Natural Resources (DNR) prohibits the removal of these islands once they are established. “We cannot undo the land mass that has already formed; we can only fight to save what remains,” says board member Jacob Jenkins. 

This isn’t just an issue for local boaters losing navigable water—it is an environmental emergency. The formation of these unnatural islands creates artificial barriers that drastically slow down water circulation. 

During warm Indiana summers, this stagnant water creates a perfect storm for thick, suffocating mats of invasive algae to blanket the surface. These algae mats do more than ruin a view; they block vital sunlight from reaching native underwater vegetation and rapidly deplete dissolved oxygen levels. The result is a degraded habitat where fish and diverse aquatic life are quite literally suffocated. This environment is also a breeding ground for greater numbers of mosquitoes and other pests than are ecologically and historically normative. This once deep, clean, flowing riverine habitat is transitioning into a choked, stagnant wetland zone.

The path forward requires both local action and systemic advocacy. A comprehensive Sediment Removal Plan prepared by Everclear Aquatic Management was submitted to the Indiana DNR earlier this year, outlining a multi-phase dredging project to remove roughly 94,000 cubic yards of sediment and restore critical shoreline flow.

According to board members from Save Baugo Bay, Inc., dredging is only a temporary fix if we don’t address the troubles that are literally taking root in the Bay.

True conservation requires us to be vigilant activists. As a community, we must pressure private entities and utilities to keep their promises and push state and county authorities to fix the broken regional drainage systems upstream.

Baugo Bay is a regional treasure, a haven for local wildlife, and a critical component of our county’s watershed. We must act to restore its channels, halt the runaway accumulation of sediment, and protect this ecosystem before the bay is lost to the mud for good.

To learn more about the engineering plans, view historical aerial imagery of the island growth, or support the local matching grant efforts, visit save-baugo-bay.com and write savebaugobay@gmail.com to learn how you can get involved. 

© 2026 Brian S Collier. All opinions are those of the author. The author reserves all Rights and copyrights. To request permission to reprint any or all of this article, contact info@redresssouthbend.com. 

Reprinted with permission of the author by Redress South Bend.

All opinions, research, and views in this piece are attributed to the author and are not necessarily the thoughts or opinions of Redress South Bend. 

Amazon, AWS, in New Carlisle, recently received permission to drain 31.2 million gallons of water per day using the Niespodziany Ditch as a spillway. 

We typically measure water in acre-feet. This measurement is the amount of water required to cover one acre of land to a depth of one foot. Thus, 31,200,000 gallons of water is roughly 96 acre-feet. A good calculator for this can be found here from Western-Water.com.

To put that in perspective, if the upper bowl at Notre Dame Stadium is 137 feet above the ground and the circumference is a bit more than ½ mile, and accounting for the sloped walls, the bowl itself, if watertight, would hold about 12 million cubic feet of water or about 275 acre-feet of water. This means that every three days, you could overfill Notre Dame’s football stadium with water.

More significantly, think of the beloved Diamond Lake in nearby Cassopolis, Michigan. This lake contains roughly 17,133 acre-feet of water in an average year. This would be approximately 5.6 billion gallons. If Amazon is pumping 31,200,000 gallons of water per day, that is 11,388,000,000 (more than 11 billion) gallons of water per year, meaning the lake could be drained more than twice annually in terms of water usage and still not equal the amount of water being pumped away from the AWS plant in New Carlisle. 

Sometimes large numbers are hard to consider, and while these two extreme examples are meant to help us understand the amount of water we’re discussing in terms of pumping in our county and region, the amount can also be quantified in other ways. 

The city of South Bend (and its surrounding areas) uses only 11.3 million gallons of drinking water per day. The amount of water pumped away from the AWS plant this year would, if treated, be enough to supply the South Bend area for more than 2.5 years. 

What will all of this pumping of water in the region do to aquifers, inland lakes, and individual wells? We don’t know. In the rush to garner contracts, appropriate studies never occurred. Anyone who says otherwise is lying, because if the studies were done, Amazon would have known that its project was on the second-largest marshland in the United States, the Kankakee. These wetlands are second in size in the United States, only to the Florida Everglades. If this water abatement was not part of the original understanding of the project for construction purposes, then we are left only to imagine what environmental problems and long-term impacts were also left unstudied. 

Placing a dollar value on water is a tricky endeavor, but our cities do it all of the time. However, agricultural water in our region costs about $50-$100 per acre-foot, so this pumped water has a value of about $2 million per year, should Hoosiers want to use it for these purposes. Surprisingly, Amazon is not trying to spin the story as a corporate entity; they are freeing the water and making it available to farmers for free, although the battle isn’t yet over, and this kind of political spin could yet still come. 

The AWS plant, located almost directly on the North-South Continental Divide, is also gravely concerning. Pumping water on a divide has already shown deleterious effects elsewhere in the United States and around the planet. 

Citizens still have avenues for redress in these issues. In Festus, Missouri, last month, citizens ousted four incumbent council members who supported a data center and were seeking reelection. In suburban Milwaukee, citizens of Port Washington, Wisconsin, passed a referendum restricting future data center projects. Additionally, as citizens, for the moment, we control the roads, the power supply, and more for these regions, and we still have time to act as regulators of these data centers, but the action must come quickly and not be done through ‘agreements’ but through legal contracts. Our nation has an immediate and urgent need for forward-thinking legal arrangements with Amazon and others building data centers before they garner even more economic and political support. 

Any political malfeasance you suspect from either party in Washington, D.C., is not the story. The story is right here in New Carlisle, Indiana, as well as in other areas, where we are being pressured into hurried growth for data centers that provide very little economic growth in the regions but could take the ultimate toll on our environment and thus our true livelihoods. 

The author wishes to thank Professors Mark Fiege, Janet Ore, and Dan Tyler, all formerly of Colorado State University, for teaching him about the value of water and how to think of it as an important shared resource. The author also wishes to acknowledge and thank the Handy Ditch and Irrigation Company (Weld and Larimer Counties) for allowing him to study and work alongside them in the late 1990s to understand the role of irrigation and the diverse perspectives on water use. Without the lessons from those professors and the Handy Ditch company, his understanding and thinking about water and community would be very different. 

© 2026 Brian S Collier. All opinions are those of the author. The author reserves all Rights and copyrights. To request permission to reprint any or all of this article, contact info@redresssouthbend.com. 

Reprinted with permission of the author by Redress South Bend.

All opinions and views in this piece are attributed to the author and are not necessarily the thoughts or opinions of Redress South Bend.