The Northeast Corridor: The Trains, the People, the History, the Region

by David Alff

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.
 

Genres: History, Travel, Nonfiction, Politics, Urban Planning, Transport, American History

296 pages, Hardcover

First published April 19, 2024

Reviews

[ambyr · Rating 2 out of 5]

A slapdash collection of anecdotes and name drops that fails to achieve more than the sum of its parts. One of the designers of the Canton Viaduct was James Whistler's father? Okay, but why does it matter? James Wilkes Booth's brother once had a cottage near the power plant that fed the original New Haven catenary? Who cares? The goal of these asides is, I guess, to give a sense of how the Northeast Corridor is entangled with greater American history, but they're so shallow all they do is make me feel like the author fell down a Wikipedia rabbit hole and wants to make sure everyone knows what he found. Meanwhile, deeper parts of the history, like the ICC's role in the collapse of American rail, aren't mentioned at all. This is a book that assumes its readers know a great deal about rail history (which I do), and then fails to offer any analysis or other value-adds to justify why those readers would bother picking it up at all.

I was particularly annoyed to get unnecessarily graphic descriptions of a variety of lethal train crashes (and, for some reason, lists of passenger professions), but no follow-up about how they impacted future construction or policies. Do you want to know about the evolution of Positive Train Control on the Northeast Corridor? Don't read this book, where the existence of PTC and other braking technologies isn't even mentioned.

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

Enjoyed it and learned a lot, but the writing style was a bit odd. It read like a long-form news article which bored me at times. The book does raise good points though on why this country should be TRIPLING Amtrak's budget and why it should constantly be looking for new ways to revive rail infrastructure. Also, it helps prove why the northeast is possibly the single greatest place to live on Earth.

[Takuya Amagai · Rating 4 out of 5]

A sometimes dense but comprehensive account of the ups and downs of the Northeast corridor. Future of the railroads? TBD

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book is an excellent summary of the history and significance of the Northeast Corridor. Despite being an academic, the author writes clearly and engagingly. He avoids the pitfall of excessive technical detail that would put off the general reader.

[Joan · Rating 5 out of 5]

The next time someone asks me where I'm from, I just might tell them "The Northeast Corridor". From Boston to Baltimore, and a number of communities in-between, I've always lived close to the rail lines that serve this region, and ridden the trains of what is now Amtrak and its predecessor corporations, and of the various regional commuter railroads, all my life. That I've never resided in Washington, DC, the southern terminus of the megalopolis in question, is beside the point – I've taken the train there too on a number of occasions.

At innumerable times in the quiet hours of the night and early morning, I've heard the whistles of trains passing in the distance. While some people may find that sound lonely, to me it connotes both the comfort of familiarity and offers the enticing allure of adventure and new experiences. I have always preferred trains to any other sort of travel since I first rode the Pennsy (the former Pennsylvania Railroad) into Philadelphia for school clothes shopping and tearoom lunching with my mother to prepare for my foray into the first grade.

This book, while a historical and fact-filled account of the area's development into the most densely populated and frequently traveled region of the country, is almost poetic in the language that describes the places the trains go.

The author explains how the Northeast Corridor is a historic place full of firsts in American history, but also that the trains often run along what were the pathways of Native American tribes, and follow the great rivers where they fished and obtained their water, and in some places along the scenic shoreline with its infinite ocean views, and reaches back to that time and those landscapes. It also covers great feats of engineering, political maneuvering and financial conniving, and explains the incorporation of the many waves of immigrants (and sadly, slaves, in some places) who built it, and lived along its routes.

This highly readable work covers all elements subtitled on its cover: the trains, the history, the people, and the region, and it does it beautifully. Highly recommended!

[Carlos Paredes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Probably the best book I read all year

Quotes:

“And yet [Claiborne] Pell won six consecutive terms in the US Senate. He championed the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the federal tuition subsidies called Pell Grants. On his death in 2009 Wonkette columnist Sara K. Smith called Pell "a big fat liberal and a millionaire who was obsessed with UFOs and jogged around Newport in his old Princeton letter sweater and drove a Mustang with a foll-bar because he was such a bad driver... It really is too bad that they don't make rich people like that anymore.” Among his eccentricities, Pell loved trains and fought for their revival. He would become the modern corridor's founding father and kooky uncle. (158-159)

[Gretchen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazingly engaging and well-written for an academic historian; highly accessible. And finally, a book that helps me define where I’m from! References to the Dinky, the Paoli line, speed records through Kingston, waiting through the change from electric to diesel at New Haven, NY Penn Station’s multiple iterations, Acela reintegrating Boston into the megalopolis, the ancient trestles over the Meadowlands, and why the train curves around Kensington in that interminable crawl north of Philly to approach the city from the west. All pieces of my life story, which has included residence in Boston, RI, New Haven, New York, north Jersey, Princeton, and Philadelphia. Felt thoroughly at home in this book.

[Carol · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was one of my "slow chews". So much information packed into it, that I wanted time to digest.

If you are a traveler on the Northeast Corridor, and especially if you embark on any of the trains - Amtrak, SEPTA, MARTA, that traverse this area, you may enjoy this read.

The Corridor goes from Boston (South Station) to Washington, D.C. The history covers some of the major accidents, the political and financial turmoil involved in the maintenance of the infrastructure, including the 30th Street Station, Union Station, Penn Station and Moynihan Hall.

The future of train travel lies ahead.

[Kris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh, this slaps. Yes, a book about effing trains slaps. It starts with geography and geology and the indigenous peoples of North America and takes you through the colonial era, the Revolutionary War, the Federal era, antebellum and Reconstruction, the Gilded Age and two World Wars. The St. Louis Cardinals make an appearance, along with Napoleon's brother. And trains. So many trains. Trains going fast, trains going slow, trains crashing. A lot of crashes. And yes Joe Biden makes multiple appearances. This truly is a Stefon sketch as a book and it's about infrastructure. Amazing.

[E · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really interesting look at how railroad developed in the northeastern United States. It would have been better if the author had kept his own politics out of it, but what do you expect from a professor at SUNY Buffao?

The work is more episodic than encyclopedic, but so many good stories can be told about the Washington-Boston train corridor that I didn't mind. Keep in mind it was a private enterprise far longer than it's been a federal boondoggle (the word everyone uses--and for good reason). Let me put it this way--it wasn't the public fisc that paid for Grand Central Terminal.

[Yaakov Bressler · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you’ve ever wondered why the NorthEast Corridor is so f**ked, this book will answer all your Q’s. (Hint: it starts long before railroads.)

Tells the story of the Northeast corridor, an excellent and twisting story at that. Great overview of the history, with the right amount of depth. Clever foreshadowing throughout, which is hard to do with history but Alff prevails.

Highly recommend to anyone who enjoys riding trains in the NEC - you will learn a lot about this route - how special it is, how delicate it once was, and how important it is for us to bolster.

[Russell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Solid history of the well worn path along the East Coast, starting as a footpath and then as a canal before taking its final form as a railroad. I enjoyed reading how the Hudson tunnels and the current catenary system came to be, as well as corporate creation and subsequent dismantling of Penn Central, and how the current alphabet soup of transit organizations came to be. This book is well overdue back to the library.

[DW Rowlands · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was really excited to hear that a book was coming out about the Northeast Corridor but, honestly, this was fairly disappointing. Some of the history of the corridor was interesting, but it really felt more like a collection of random anecdotes than a book that had a clear point or an interest in a consistent, detailed review of a topic.

[Hannah Madden]

Love a book about the og 13!!

[Samuel Lipscomb · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love trains and I loved this book.

[Harry Stone · Rating 4 out of 5]

Often flowery language, a love story to the NE Corridor. The introduction was the best part - not a super critical eye on how the Northeast Corridor became to be.

[Brandon Pytel · Rating 5 out of 5]

“How did the corridor come to be what it is? Can it get better? Can it be enough?” Those are the questions at the heart of this book, which examines how the Northeast Corridor came to be — the piecemeal and mismatched history of its infrastructure, the men who built it, and all those who ride it.

“They could not recognize their individual epicsa s chan[ters of a single volume. No one knew they were building a corridor.”

Perhaps most interesting is how the northeast is defined, by movement, in ways that other segments of the country are not: The corridor has always been about a certain “groundbreaking ingenuity and brooding workaholism” and restlessness, and its passenger rail reflects those values.

“Everything is in constant motion and every change seems an improvement."

The northeast was the first place developed by white men; but in an age of canals and wagons, these men would have to wait for the industrial might of the railroad to truly carve through the landscape and connect the cities.

That would come in a hodgepodge of private interests and railroads looking to make loads of money and gain enough power in state legislatures and city halls to have monopolies over certain regions. At the same time, these companies wanted to showcase this power in the magnificence of their train stations.

Of course, along the way there are the infrastructure problems that have defined the region and its tracks: notably, New York being an island, and how difficult and dangerous it was to tunnel, but also that trains were wired by electricity between DC but powered by diesel north of New York.

That electricity became an advantage, incentivized by local and state laws to clean up the air, create a quieter grid, offload heavy coal and water, and fix the problem with ventless tunnels. Electric trains also contained fewer parts, accelerated faster, and allowed companies to pack more trains on the same length of track.

After world war 2 and the ascent of private automobiles and popularity of flying, alongside the collapse of the northeast coal industry, maintenance was deferred, leading to some high profile accidents — and some executives refusing to see the new competition. As people fled urban cores, stations became neglected, further depressing the situation.

To compete both with these other modes and also on the international level, faster, sleeker trains were introduced, but that posed its own problem, from curves to twisting tunnels to the presence of freights and commuter trains.

Still, "despite their troubles, the demonstrations located a latent love of train travel that survived decades of neglect, hostility, bad plans, and sloppy execution. It showed that people would take trains if the railroad tried to make them worth riding.”

As car ownership and jet travel continues to surge, few companies wanted to deal with passengers, which was very hard to make money on: "Drowning in debt, reviled by riders, plagued by scandal, scourged by infighting, and devoid of capital, the railroad begged for a federal bailout.”

Thus Amtrak was born. But the arrival of Amtrak was done so halfheartedly, set up for failure, as it was expected to make money which it could never do, with a shoe string budget and lackluster maintenance habits, plus the inheritance of rundown infrastructure. It also ran much fewer trains than the system it replaced.

But the corridor, with its density and propensity for movement and transit, was still an opportunity. State and local funding meanwhile rejuvenated some service, offering commuter trains on the same tracks as Amtrak. The eventual introduction of the Acela train also improved outlooks and reputation of passenger rail.

The story of the northeast coordinator today seems successful in one sense — in that it’s Amtrak’s only profitable segment — but it still seems hamstrung by 19th century infrastructure, ballooning costs, and our nation’s general inability to build great public works. Still, it offers an interesting story of our nation’s history and relationship with passenger rail, and a bright spot in how with the right investments and will, it can work.

[Bryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Solid narrative history of the nation's most important passenger rail corridor. I enjoyed the way key moments were written in a dramatic style. Worth reading for anyone with an interest in the history of American RRs.