Forging Early America’s Northeastern Backbone

A review of The Northeast Corridor: The Trains, the People, the History, the Region, by David Alff, 280 pages, The University of Chicago Press (April 2024).

One mark of a great writer is an ability to produce beautiful prose even when describing life’s passing banalities. By way of example, I give you David Alff, herein describing Barack Obama’s view from the train that took him from Philadelphia to Washington three days before his first inauguration:

a washed-out collage of polyvinyl cable, cracked rebar, rigidized metal, and leafless trees beside the gray chop of the Delaware River. Cathedrals spired over rowhomes. Stone-crushing plants shouldered up against scrapyards and algal ponds. Freeways clogged with rigs and sedans…a place used to get to other places, an architecture of anticipation, an inglorious backdrop on which to project a perfected union.

The Northeast Corridor is packed with this kind of poetry. But I assure you this isn’t some art-house meditation on the rail-scarred earth of the mid-Atlantic. Alff has produced a proper history of the eponymous rail line from Boston to Washington, D.C. that became early America’s infrastructural backbone. And somehow, he managed to pack it into a book that’s scarcely more than 250 pages, despite also providing an abundance of memorable digressions into the arts of rail-station architecture, bridge construction, and tunnel blasting.

The Northeast Corridor

All aboard for the first comprehensive history of the hard-working and wildly influential Northeast Corridor. Traversed by thousands of trains and millions of riders, the Northeast Corridor might be America’s most famous railway, but its influence goes far beyond the right-of-way. David Alff welcomes readers aboard to see how nineteenth-century train tracks did more than connect Boston to Washington, DC. They transformed hundreds of miles of Atlantic shoreline into a political capital, a global financial hub, and home to fifty million people. The Northeast Corridor reveals how freight trains, commuter rail, and Amtrak influenced—and in turn were shaped by—centuries of American industrial expansion, metropolitan growth, downtown decline, and revitalization. Paying as much attention to Aberdeen, Trenton, New Rochelle, and Providence as to New York City, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, Alff provides narrative thrills for history buffs, train enthusiasts, and adventurers alike. What’s more, he offers a glimpse into the future of the corridor. New infrastructural plans—supported by President Joe Biden, famously Amtrak’s biggest fan—envision ever-faster trains zipping along technologically advanced rails. Yet those tracks will literally sit atop a history that links the life of Frederick Douglass, who fled to freedom by boarding a train in Baltimore, to the Frederick Douglass Tunnel, which is expected to be the newest link in the corridor by 2032. Trains have long made the places that make America, and they still do.