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.

Like so many other American creation stories, The Northeast Corridor delivers a star turn to Benjamin Franklin. It’s 1723, and the future Philadelphian is still in his late teens—a callow apprentice fleeing an internship at his brother’s print shop on the invented claim that he’d impregnated a “naughty girl.”

Franklin had nothing to do with the creation of America’s rail system, whose first tracks wouldn’t be laid until well into the next century. But the details of his teenage trip to Philadelphia, summarised by Alff based on an account contained in Franklin’s autobiography, do much to explain why future Americans would shoulder the high cost of laying track up and down their eastern seaboard’s ragged landscape: Getting around the United States in the days before trains was slow, dirty, and dangerous.

Franklin’s 1 October 1723 voyage began on the Battery docks, from which he set sail to New Jersey on a southbound ferry. Unfortunately, the ship’s sail was destroyed by a sudden squall even before escaping New York Bay. As the boat bobbed around, passengers grew seasick and parched. There was nothing to drink, Franklin reported, except “a bottle of filthy rum.”

Eventually, the damaged vessel made it to the coastal New Jersey town of Perth Amboy, where Franklin disembarked amid giant piles of shells discarded by local oyster rakers. From there, he set off inland toward Philadelphia, which lay at a distance of about 60 miles.

At the time, American roads were still little more than bumpy paths, which often succumbed to floods, mud, and ice, according to the season. Even in good weather, Alff writes, “each rut and cobble rattled the ribs of passengers on plank-bench wagons slung over tar-greased wheels.” By the time Franklin made it to the eastern shores of the Delaware River several days later, he’d become so bedraggled that he found, “by the questions ask’d me, I was suspected to be some runaway servant.”

Even then, he still had a river crossing to manage, as the first bridge across the Delaware wouldn’t be built for another 83 years. And so Franklin joined the crew of a rowboat making a night crossing. The men got lost in the darkness, and so they all spent the wee hours on a frigid beach downriver, huddled for warmth around a fire fed with stolen fenceposts.

All in all, Franklin’s 90-mile trip from New York to Philadelphia took five days, a period during which he was imperilled by maritime disaster, thirst, hunger, food poisoning, bitter cold, and (at least twice) the possibility of arrest. By contrast, a modern rail traveller can make the journey from Manhattan to Philadelphia in less than an hour and a half.

The first working steam-powered railway locomotive was produced in 1804 by British inventor Richard Trevithick. While specimens of this new technology would soon make their way to the United States, it would take another quarter century before the first passenger rail services began operation.

The biggest challenge confronting America’s early railway visionaries wasn’t one that could be solved in a workshop: Their young country had no peacetime tradition of constructing public works that required large capital investments and crossed jurisdictional boundaries. States clung to their colonial-era grudges and rivalries well into the nineteenth century. Even the cities, Alff writes, saw their economic relationship with other municipalities in zero-sum terms, and so “paid less attention to each other than to the task of turning their hinterlands into cargo bound for Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, and Canada.”

While rail had long been used to move coal and other bulk commodities along private track at mines and factories, no one had any clear idea how this technology might be applied to mass-retail passenger transport. Potential investors weren’t even sure what they were being asked to finance:

Was it a tool for miners? A portage patch between rivers? A winter workaround for frozen canal beds? Would tracks act like a mechanized [public] highway to which passengers brought their personal vehicles? Or would they behave like the Erie Canal, a state-owned conduit served by private barge lines? The age of iron and steam could not be answered until these administrative questions had answers.

And so, the first railroads laid in the United States were hyper-local operations, constructed by mechanically inclined eccentrics and dreamers. When a New Jersey-based army colonel named John Stevens set out to create what he hoped would be his country’s first passenger railroad in 1814, he marked the 26 miles between New Brunswick, NJ and Trenton by his own hand with rod and chain, snaking a pokey trail through northern New Jersey along the edges of creeks and farms.

A man ahead of his time, Stevens proclaimed in 1814 that he’d taken the first step in creating a route ‘between the different parts of our country, safe from the risks of the sea or the power of the enemy.’

A man ahead of his time, Stevens proclaimed that he’d taken the first step in creating a route “between the different parts of our country, safe from the risks of the sea or the power of the enemy.” (By this, he meant the British, as the War of 1812 had not yet formally ended.) Alas, the only actual track he ever laid was a tourist curiosity on the grounds of his Hoboken hotel. And even that tiny project ended in tragedy when a boiler explosion took his adult daughter’s life.

It was the completion of the aforementioned Erie Canal in 1825 that finally focused east-coast business interests on the necessity of railroads. By providing a navigable waterway connecting the Great Lakes to the Hudson River, the canal enshrined New York’s status as America’s dominant port, and so threatened to turn every other coastal city into a backwater. There’s a reason New Jersey and Maryland played such outsized roles in American rail history, Alff notes: Both are “squashed between larger states,” while lacking New York’s “drainpipe to the interior.”

America’s first common-carrier railroad, the fabled Baltimore and Ohio, was created by a group of Baltimore businessmen seeking to restore “that portion of the Western trade which has recently been diverted from [us].” The enterprise wouldn’t make good on its name until 1852, when the company’s engineers finally laid track into the Ohio Valley. But the B&O would eventually go on to operate a sprawling rail network whose trains took travellers and trade goods to Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Chicago before heading back east with freight wagons full of Midwestern coal.

At the time the B&O began operation, horses were still sometimes used to haul rolling stock. (Indeed, one early proposal for a Boston-Providence line imagined each train being equipped with a “platform, placed on small wheels, on which the horse himself may ride when making long descents.”) But that changed soon after inventor Peter Cooper (of Cooper Union college fame) designed and built the first American-made steam locomotive, the Tom Thumb.

In 1829, the owners of Stockton and Company, a Maryland-based stagecoach line, challenged Cooper to an eight-mile race pitting horse against train. The horse won after the Tom Thumb suffered a mechanical malfunction. But the train had raced out to such a commanding early lead that spectators—the B&O’s owners included, apparently—were convinced that the time had come to put the horses out to pasture.

But the great engineering marvels of the age weren’t the locomotives—which were essentially just mobile implementations of the same steam-based technology that Americans had used to “twirl boat propellers, drain copper mines, saw timber, and grind plaster of paris” for decades—but rather the bridges and tunnels required to get them past mountains and rivers.

Alff is listed as a professor of English at State University of New York in Buffalo. But given his evident fascination with transportation infrastructure, one might easily mistake him for an architect or civil engineer. Among the masterpieces of nineteenth-century American construction he details are the Canton Viaduct, a 600-foot-long hollow bridge over Massachusetts’ Neponset River that’s remained in continuous service since the mid-1830s; Washington Union Station; and the North River Tunnels, dug under the Hudson by the Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR) so that Manhattan passengers wouldn’t have to start their southbound voyages, Benjamin-Franklin-style, by sailing to New Jersey.

The Northeast Corridor can’t be classified as social history (also known as “history from below”), as Alff’s protagonists are gilded plutocrats such as J.P. Morgan and P.T. Barnum. Nevertheless, the author takes pains to educate readers about the backbreaking work that labourers and tradesmen poured into the Northeast Corridor, as in this fine passage about Canton, MA’s aforementioned viaduct, a blind arcade cavity wall built for the Boston and Providence Railroad:

Railroaders rarely sign their creations. The tracks they lay and the paths they embank remain anonymous. A railroad is not a novel or a fresco, but an artifact of many hands lost to time. [This viaduct] is the exception…If you park by the Honey Dew Donuts and walk down Neponset Street, you will come face to face with a stone wall full of strange graffiti: diamonds, triangles, plusses, hourglasses. Each mark belongs to an ancient masonic alphabet. Each scratch identifies, credits, and holds culpable whoever cut the stone. Each autograph signifies someone who built the corridor. Many masons carved granite in Canton in 1834. Over hilltops and cedar bogs carried the ring of bladed hammer on rock, the clop of oxen, the bray of horses, and the brogue of ballast crews. By day, Canton ravine echoed with the toil of Scotch and Irish immigrants, the new New Englanders replacing those Yankee farmers who fled west. At dusk, the workers retired to camps, where they drank so much beer and brawled so fiercely that the commonwealth militia twice deployed to quell riots.

The golden age of American railroading ended following the Second World War, as air travel became the preferred form of long-distance travel for the wealthy, while the Interstate Highway System would go on to hollow out the middle-class market. In the peak year of the interwar period, Americans took 1.27 billion train trips. By the end of the 1950s, the annual total had dropped to about 400 million (and this in a country whose population had grown by about 60 percent during the intervening decades).

In the early 1970s, following a series of bankruptcies, unsuccessful mergers, and high-profile accidents, the federal government stepped in to save the industry from complete ruin through the creation of quasi-public corporations—Amtrak and Conrail—that would operate passenger and cargo service (respectively) on a national scale. During its postwar retrenchment era, the Corridor’s rural and exurban tributary system shrank, as unprofitable legacy spurs were ripped up and replaced by roads, strip malls, and tract housing. In the large cities, meanwhile, many of the original rail temples that once symbolised American wealth and progress, such as Philadelphia’s iconic Broad Street Station and Penn Station in New York, were abandoned to other uses.

The project of connecting Boston to Washington with a continuous rail line was completed in 1917, when Mohawk Skywalkers put the last rivet into New York City’s Hell Gate Bridge, spanning Wards Island and Queens. For the first time in history, passengers could ride the Corridor’s full extent without using a boat or hackney cart to hop from one rail line to another. (Trains were still required to swap out their locomotives for electric replacements at Manhattan Transfer in Harrison, NJ, however, as the North River Tunnel ventilation systems couldn’t accommodate steam engines—a practice that would continue until the full electrification of the Corridor’s southern half was completed in the 1930s.)

But even once completed, the Northeast Corridor would remain hobbled by the jigsaw-puzzle nature of its creation. As Alff emphasises, none of the original track-builders thought of their project as anything so grand as a “Corridor,” let alone one spanning 460 miles, eight states, and 108 stations. Over time, their lines did eventually push out toward one another, but only in the unconscious fashion of “houseplants toward sunlight.”

How Mohawk ‘Skywalkers’ Helped Build New York City’s Tallest Skyscrapers | HISTORY

Native American riveting gangs worked on the ‘high steel’ for iconic structures like the Chrysler Building, Empire State Building, Rockefeller Plaza and more.

This piecemeal approach wasn’t seen as critically problematic in the days when most trains didn’t move much faster than a man could run. (In the early 1830s, the B&O’s owners announced a $500 prize to the engineer who could provide a locomotive that would pull fifteen tonnes at fifteen miles per hour.) If a route had to be swung wide of a popular market or a local magnate’s estate, so be it.

But as trains got faster, and other transportation technologies began competing with rail, many of those local detours and delays evolved into costly bottlenecks—and some of them still slow American travellers to this day.

In this regard, Alff provides a case study set during the frenzied early days of the mid-Atlantic rail boom, when an upstart outfit called the Philadelphia & Trenton (P&T) petitioned government officials for the right to connect its humble upstate network to downtown Philadelphia by a direct route along the Pennsylvania side of the Delaware River. Fatefully, it was a path that would go straight through Kensington—a hardscrabble Pennsylvania town that has since become an equally hardscrabble Philadelphia neighbourhood.

The P&T would soon be taken over by the larger and more powerful Camden & Amboy (C&A), whose owners combined the resources of the two companies so as to permit riders to travel on an almost-complete line from New York Bay to downtown Philadelphia. “All that stood between the Hudson docks and the heart of William Penn’s ‘green countie town,’” Alff writes, was tiny Kensington.

At the time, few imagined that the C&A wouldn’t get its way with local politicians, as the company was known to be generous (even by the corrupt standards of the day) with its bribes and kickbacks. As one journalist described the railroad’s business methods back in New Jersey, “there never was a more complete master anywhere of the destinies of a state than this monster monopoly.”

But the residents of Kensington, textile workers from Ireland not known for their quiescence, had other plans. These included a dedicated propaganda campaign featuring posters depicting a scowling anthropogenic C&A train maiming a child as it barrelled through Kensington. Accompanying text, appealing equally to class solidarity and Philadelphia’s municipal inferiority complex, warned residents that their beloved neighbourhood would soon become a “mere right of way” for avaricious Gothamites who regarded Pennsylvania as “a suburb of New York.”

On 27 July 1840, an angry Kensington mob (described at the time as “an immense gang of women”) routed a railroad-company work crew that had come to dig up North Front Street, and made a bonfire of their construction materials. When police arrived, rioters attacked them as well. At some point, the sheriff fled to a local tavern owned by the P&T’s President, one John Naglee—which the crowd promptly destroyed.

The outraged rail tycoons howled in protest, and called in every political favour they could. But their workers would never again return to Kensington. Even 27 years later, when a throughline was finally pushed through downtown Philadelphia, Alff writes, “its route avoided Kensington like yellow fever, skimming overtop the ward [at Frankford Junction], then crossing the Schuylkill River twice before wrapping back to City Hall. [To this day], trains sway through turns as their passengers pay for a nineteenth-century borough’s fight to save itself.”

In the film version, as I like to imagine it, Kensington’s “immense gang of women” (presumably led by some suitably Erin Brockovich-esque character) plays the role of collective hero, with Naglee (think Paul Giamatti) playing the villain. But those riotous Irish-American garment workers may seem less heroic to anyone who regularly rides the Northeast Corridor. Thanks to the blockage at Kensington, the trip from Trenton to Philadelphia—a distance of less than 30 miles—takes about half an hour. That’s not so bad by comparison with Interstate 95, the Corridor’s traffic-clogged asphalt cousin. But by modern global standards, it’s quite slow. Japan’s Kyoto–Osaka route, which covers roughly the same distance, runs in as little as 12 minutes thanks to ruler-straight rights-of-way created in the 1960s, as Alff puts it, “free from the burdens of history.”

That phrase gave me pause because, as I see it, the source of the modern Northeast Corridor’s obsolescence isn’t too much history, but too little.

Over the last two centuries, great swathes of Europe and Asia have been destroyed by war and revolution—apocalyptic horrors that took hundreds of millions of lives and left whole urban areas in ruin. But those horrors also created blank slates on which later generations could build new kinds of cities and transportation networks. The American Northeast has never suffered cataclysm on anywhere near the same scale. Nor has it ever fallen under the sort of centralised top-down political order—of the type that’s managed the construction of high-speed rail in China, Japan, and many European countries—which allows leaders to suppress Kensington-style dissent in the name of the greater good. Like all of life’s treasures, peace and freedom come with a price. And when it comes to American rail travel, that price is measured in minutes and hours.

It would be unfair to suggest that the Northeast Corridor has entered a permanent state of decline. Since the introduction of Amtrak’s Acela service in 2000, riders have been able to travel the Corridor on what technically qualifies as “high-speed rail.” According to a 2005 source cited by Alff, Acela helped Amtrak capture more than half the combined air-and-rail market between Washington and New York, while Amtrak’s share of the Boston–New York market more than doubled, from 18 percent to 40 percent. The brand is sufficiently well-known that headline writers now speak of “the Acela Corridor” (though the term is primarily used as a term of abuse among conservatives).

Unfortunately, thanks to the dated nature of the Corridor’s infrastructure, these Acela trains are able to hit their 150-mile-per-hour (242 km-per-hour) top speed over just 11 percent of the track. And even that maximum pales compared to high-speed trains running comparably well-travelled routes in other wealthy nations.

And then there are the days when the trains don’t run at all. Three months ago, Amtrak lost power on ten miles of its track when one if its circuit breakers exploded near Midtown Manhattan, incapacitating an electrical substation serving tunnels under the Hudson River. The knock-on effects halted trains along the line from Massachusetts to Pennsylvania. According to federal legislators representing New Jersey, this was just one of nineteen instances during May and June in which Amtrak service disruptions created “serious delays” for riders on New Jersey Transit (which shares track with Amtrak).

As The New York Times noted in an August 21 article, a disproportionate number of route delays and cancellations originate with the line segment between Manhattan and Newark—which runs on an antiquated patchwork of electrical equipment, much of it originally built a century ago by the PRR using a 25 Hz traction power system that’s been obsolete for decades. According to Amtrak officials, implementing the full roster of repairs and improvements required by the Northeast Corridor would cost $100-billion and take 13 years to complete.

The fundamental flaw embedded in the Northeast Corridor is, in some ways, the fundamental problem embedded in America itself.

It’s a country that got very rich, very fast by giving wide berth to inventors and entrepreneurs—and by immigrating legions of skilled men and women who could turn their blueprints into reality. The Tom Thumb, Canton Viaduct, Hell Gate Bridge, and North River Tunnels are all testaments to that spirit.

But as demonstrated by America’s fall from global leader to laggard in the field of rail-service operation, the national qualities that lend themselves to the creation of one-off mechanical marvels and architectural wonders are very different from those required to rationally plan, build out, maintain, and modernise sprawling systems of infrastructure (or, for that matter, health care, schooling, and public assistance) on a regional or national scale. The former project, corresponding to the Northeast Corridor’s early years, can be accomplished by scattered geniuses and deep-pocketed investors—of which America has always had plenty. The latter, corresponding to the Corridor’s postwar decline, requires an active corps of competent, widely trusted, well-resourced central planners—of which America has comparably few.

Ultimately, that’s the reason why a train ride from Trenton to Philadelphia still takes almost half an hour; why New York’s Second Avenue Subway, originally proposed 104 years ago, still has only three stations; and why the country hasn’t built a major new airport since Bill Clinton’s first term.

I’m sure any American reading this could supply a multitude of other examples. What the Northeast Corridor makes clear is that this isn’t a new problem. It’s an existential failing that’s been riveted into America’s “architecture of anticipation” for almost 200 years.