Read an Excerpt from “The Northeast Corridor” by David Alff
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, now in paperback, 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. Read on for an excerpt from the introduction.
Three days before he entered the White House, Barack Obama stood on a platform at Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station. The president-elect studied his train. It had two diesel engines, nine stainless steel Amtrak carriages, and one royal blue Pullman observation car. Lanyarded passengers filed aboard. Reporters scribbled in pads. Secret Service agents orbited. 30th Street Station is famous for its waiting room, a pale-honey travertine gallery brightened by portico windows and pendant chandeliers. But none of this radiance reaches the platforms, where riders come and go through creosote-scented gloom.
Obama boarded his Pullman. The train blasted its airchime horn, shuddered into sunlight, and rumbled off toward Washington. Crowds gathered on the Chestnut Street overpass. Onlookers clung to chain-link fences, clambered onto car hoods, and scampered up embankments. They came to see a journey that had no practical purpose. The Obamas already lived in Washington. They had resided in suites at the Hotel Hay-Adams and Blair House for weeks. In late January the incoming first family left the capital so they could arrive again, by rail.
Their so-called Inaugural Express promised bystanders and television viewers an American panorama, from bustling cities to sleepy whistle-stops. Obama found patriotic poetry in a route that linked Philadelphia, where “farmers and lawyers, merchants and soldiers, gathered to declare their independence,” with Delaware, the first state to ratify the Constitution, and Baltimore, birthplace of the “Star-Spangled Banner.” Obama invited aboard people he met campaigning in Ohio, Georgia, Montana, and elsewhere. The delegation embodied his hope that Americans “from the north and the south and the east and the west” would join to “seek a better world in our time.”
Despite its geographical outreach, Obama’s steel parade could not help but highlight one particular region: the northeast. There were no fruited plains or majestic peaks here, just 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. So many petroleum refineries hugged the tracks in Marcus Hook that Greenpeace urged the train’s cancellation lest it provoke “the terrorist release of ultrahazardous chemicals.”
The scenery looked nothing like the romantic railscapes that Americans often conjure: a lone locomotive chuffing over prairie or threading alpine passes, its forlorn whistle haunting pioneer wilderness. Obama’s journey was no Kodak canyon excursion or rocket ride into space but a banal act of transit through lands so familiar they hid themselves. What spectators saw behind the Inaugural Express was a place used to get other places, an architecture of anticipation, an inglorious backdrop on which to project a perfected union—a convergence called the Northeast Corridor.
In its most literal sense, the corridor is a fistful of train tracks that solder Boston to Washington via Providence, New Haven, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. The rails are hot-rolled steel beams. Spikes bind the beams to ties made of treated oak or prestressed concrete. The ties rest in a bed of crushed limestone called ballast. Above this gravel path hangs the copper catenary that feeds current to electric trains. Bridges carry this cat’s cradle of rail and wire over rivers and ravines. Tunnels inject it into downtown cores. Cuts and embankments keep things level in between.
In 2019 corridor trains carried 820,000 riders each day—a head count greater than the populations of San Francisco or Denver. Trains delivered those people to hundreds of thousands of jobs (including one-third of Fortune 100 firms), 263 colleges within five miles of a station, and over a third of civilization’s most visited museums. The line links the world’s leading financial hub with its most consequential political capital. Economists estimate that closing the corridor for a single day would sacrifice one hundred million dollars’ worth of lost labor to gridlock. In congressional testimony, Drexel University president John Fry called the corridor the “epicenter of American rail travel” and “America’s greatest transportation asset.”
So great is this asset that the word corridor has grown synonymous with its region. People do not simply ride the corridor but live there too. Amtrak’s tracks anchor a socioeconomic enclave that extends 457 miles from Washington to Massachusetts. Once home to tens of thousands of Algonquians, this coastal band became a beachhead for colonial conquest, a testbed of the Industrial Revolution, a fiscal laboratory, and a fount of global policy. The corridor today holds fifty million people, including Indigenous Americans, descendants of European colonists and the Africans they enslaved, and immigrants from everywhere. Despite their numbers and clout, northeasterners have also weathered recessions, abandonment, and decay. Part hearth, part ruin, the corridor has always been a place to live and to leave.
Rhode Island senator Claiborne Pell saw the region as an “unbroken sea of twinkling lights that signifies a continuous chain of human habitation and human activity.” Pell was obsessed with Megalopolis, a 1961 book by French-Ukrainian geographer Jean Gottmann, who deemed the northeast a “new order in the organization of inhabited space.” Unlike European nations, which developed around dominant capitals (London, Paris, Rome), the northeast’s “polynuclear” structure scattered people across a single urban conglomeration (New York– Philadelphia–Baltimore). The proximity of north-eastern cities unleashed a “tidal current of commuting” between them, which Gottmann saw firsthand while riding trains between his appointments at Johns Hopkins University, Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, and Manhattan’s Rockefeller Institute.
Gottmann’s megapolitan thesis endures today in the work of Richard Florida, whose jarring phrase “Bos- Wash Mega Region” refers to a biosphere of knowledge workers who convene in seaboard cities for high salaries, bourgeoise amenities, and proximity to one another. Demographics support this impression. Residents of the corridor’s thirty trackside counties are 5.5 times more likely to take public transportation than the average American. They earn almost $13,000 a year over the median national income and attain graduate degrees 31 percent more often than those who live outside the region. In 2020 corridor residents cast over 70 percent of their presidential ballots for Joe Biden (who received 51 percent of all American votes).
This profile explains why corridor has become a conservative swear word. In 1961 Barry Goldwater claimed the country “would be better off if someone sawed off the eastern seaboard and let it float out to sea.” In 2017 White House deputy assistant Sebastian Gorka sneered at the “Acela Corridor of wonkery,” imagining the Trump administration’s deep state enemies as train riders. Conservative law professor F. H. Buckley railed against the “lawyers, academics, trust-fund babies and high- tech workers, clustered in the Acela Corridor.” “I’m the kind of patriot whom people on the Acela corridor laugh at,” claimed J. D. Vance in Hillbilly Elegy.
Corridor bashing, observes Paul Krugman, is a new way of proclaiming the northeast too godless, refined, and self-absorbed to qualify as “real America.” Like the Rust Belt, the Bible Belt, the Deep South, Silicon Valley, and Appalachia, the word corridor assigns culture to soil. The train line has become a signpost. A product of manufacturing might and can-do public works, the railroad now represents the region’s postindustrial ambivalence: its groundbreaking ingenuity and brooding workaholism, its ethnic diversity and flimsy introspection, its difference-seeking globalism and homogenized bubbles.
Such contradictions have led some to give up on the idea of a cohesive northeast. In 1981 journalist Joel Garreau divided the seaboard into “New England” and a mid-Atlantic “Foundry” to gratify his nagging sense that a better map “had been there, like a piece of corn stuck in your teeth.” More recently, author Colin Woodard called the northeast “meaningless,” a cartographic fairy tale that ignores “the continent’s actual settlement history and sectional rivalries.” His map dices the coast into ethnic-religious “nations”: Puritan Yankeedom, Dutch New Netherland, Quaker-Germanic Midlands, and an English Tidewater.
Such Eurocentric partition stories miss something that Gottmann gleaned from his research and that Pell pictured as a luminescent sea: the northeast is defined by motion. Its chief characteristic has never been a common creed or shared blood but an interest in elsewhere—a ceaseless to-and-fro that binds the region to itself and to the world. The corridor descends from a restless heritage that includes Lenape pathbreakers, Dutch traders, Boston mariners, Maryland couriers, and the drivers, pilots, and engineers who steer people through the region today. Examining America’s “greatest transportation asset” reveals a northeast that cannot be seen standing still. A northeast that never rinses down to a straight story because it is also a ride—one taken by millions of commuters who, on January 17, 2009, included the next president.
Excerpted from The Northeast Corridor by David Alff. © 2024 by David Alff. Published by the University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved.
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