Boulevard of Steel

From Native American trails to the bridging of Hell’s Gate, David Alff explores the surprisingly wide-ranging history of the Northeast Corridor.

It’s not exactly the Orient Express, but to David Alff Gr’12, taking the train from Philadelphia up or down the Eastern Seaboard has a romance of its own—so much so that he’s written an entire book about the route.

Northeast Corridor: The Trains, the People, the History, the Region, published earlier this year by University of Chicago Press, manages to find mystery and even poetry in the utilitarian ladder of steel running between Washington and Boston. A literary scholar by trade, Alff traces the line—and the state of mind—all the way back beyond even the earliest Native American paths up and down the coast. By the end he’s limned its transformation from train into synecdoche.

The central theme of this witty and energetic history is that the railroad, like the place that it serves, was built over time in bits and pieces, without anybody intending for it to coalesce. Various segments, Alff writes, “reached for each other like houseplants toward sunlight. They seemed destined to mesh into something greater than their parts. But 19th-century railroaders thought in more local terms. They could not yet recognize their individual epics as chapters of a single volume. No one knew they were building a corridor.”

Alff grew up near the line in Bucks County and, after attending Haverford College, earned a PhD in English at Penn. He spoke of his detour into railroading with Gazette contributor Daniel Akst C’78 in a Zoom interview from Buffalo, where Alff teaches English literature at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

Your doctoral dissertation became a book called The Wreckage of Intentions: Projects in British Culture, 1660–1730. How in the world did you get from there to the Northeast Corridor?

During the pandemic, academia went into hibernation. I missed traveling to gather with people in my field. But I also missed travel itself—especially train travel. I missed the smell of creosote on wooden ties, the sizzle of pantographs on copper catenary. I used to walk from my apartment in Center City to Fisher-Bennett Hall on Walnut Street, across the Schuylkill River and overtop the busy corridor tracks. Everywhere I heard the whistle blares of Amtrak trains approaching and departing 30th Street Station. The line was an omnipresent feature of my Philly life.

But my scholarly work also led me to trains. I had already written a book about what used to be called “projects,” in the sense of public works. That term was eventually displaced by “infrastructure,” originally a French term coined by railway engineers. So I began writing about the Northeast Corridor—a passion project, if you will. The busiest, fastest, most important passenger rail line in North America has a history that stretches back to the 1600s and 1700s—the period that I study. The tracks follow old colonial highways, which themselves followed indigenous traces. The corridor, I learned, is much older than trains.

Who first used the term Northeast Corridor?

It’s hard to track that down, if you’ll pardon the expression. Some of the earliest references I found come from the 1960s when Senator Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island began arguing for a greater integration of what was then the New Haven Railroad between Manhattan and Boston and the Pennsylvania Railroad between Manhattan and Washington, DC. He called for a consolidation of freight and passenger service that would be called the Northeast Corridor. 

The rail line has come to stand for the places it runs through (including communities hosting six of the eight Ivies). To what extent did the Northeast Corridor shape the place and vice versa?

To a certain extent, we’re not really talking about space at all. We’re talking about culture. The Northeast Corridor is both a rail line and it’s also the region that coalesced around it, one in which train travel became so important that we use the train as shorthand for the whole. And the Eastern Seaboard has developed corresponding cultural coherence. Corridor states are a good bit more liberal and Democratic than the rest of the country, though Pennsylvania remains a swing state. At the same time, a lot of what’s shared is rivalry. Before the United States was even a country, Philadelphia, Boston and New York competed for transatlantic trade and interior trans-shipment. New York had the best idea, the Erie Canal, which inspired Boston to begin experimenting with steam railroads to keep pace.

According to your book, a big reason we can’t ride up and down the corridor at 150 miles an hour is the piecemeal nature of the railroad’s construction.

The names of the early carriers—Boston and Providence, Trenton, the Philadelphia and Trenton, the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore—betray their provincial origins. Now, there were some visionaries in the early 19th century who imagined an interlocking chain of logistics that would draw together all of these states, but that would take a century to achieve. In the 1830s, we weren’t capable of tunnelling under the Hudson River or bridging New York’s Hell’s Gate (something done eventually by Alfred Pancoast Boller CE1858). All of these works required advancements in engineering; it didn’t become possible to take an unbroken ride between Washington and Boston until 1917.

The corridor’s fragmented history is a constant source of frustration for today’s travelers (just ask the New Jersey commuters who suffered through disastrous delays this summer owing to the corridor’s ancient electrical supply system). We look with longing to the high-speed rail of France, Japan, and China. But the piecemeal nature of the Northeast Corridor is what makes it such an interesting historical subject. To ride the line is to encounter these old decisions, these lost battles over eminent domain, these weird quirks that invite you to think about why it is our trains are pretty good, if not any longer the global standard. The great curve that sweeps the line west through North Philadelphia results from the tenacity of 19th-century Kensington residents who fought to keep the rails out of their community.

The Northeast Corridor today is a government rail line, but the components were built by private companies. Which were the most important?

The Baltimore and Ohio launched America’s rail revolution, but the true seaboard colossus was the Pennsylvania Railroad, which like the B&O aimed to establish connections with the West. Following the Civil War the PRR saw lucrative passenger and freight markets that would connect New York, Philadelphia, Trenton, Wilmington, Baltimore, Washington, and a rebuilding South. So the Pennsylvania acquired several individual lines, upgraded them and melded them into a great boulevard of steel. By 1900 it was the largest corporation the world had ever seen, and it was headquartered in Philadelphia, where it was a source of local pride, something too big for Wall Street to colonize. But after World War II, the spread of auto ownership and advances in aviation made railroads vulnerable. In the 1960s the Pennsylvania merged with the New York Central in a marriage of desperation. The combination soon collapsed in what was, until Enron, the largest bankruptcy in US history. That eventually led to Amtrak, and to regional entities like New Jersey Transit and SEPTA, which in fits and starts have resurrected American passenger trains and fulfilled the idea of the Northeast Corridor. 

You tell the amazing story of Ben Franklin’s days-long pre-railroad journey from Boston to Philadelphia, during which he endured hunger, thirst, and the risk of drowning. Tell us about some other noteworthy figures in the book. 

Sure. Albert Einstein lived in Princeton and habitually rode the Princeton shuttle known as the Dinky. He was fascinated by trains. His son created model trains for him. His popular rendition of the Theory of Relativity uses trains to illustrate principles of physics. George Gershwin said that the rattle and hum of the rails on the New Haven Railroad inspired him to compose “Rhapsody in Blue.” When jazz great John Coltrane lived at 1511 North 33rd Street in Philadelphia, corridor trains ran through his backyard. FDR rode the train. So did poet Marianne Moore. Obama famously rode his inaugural train to Washington. Joe Biden rode as a senator. I rode with him once when I worked at a consulting firm. I remember my boss casually pointing him out. It seemed like no big deal. 

Building the Northeastern railroads involved building a lot of great stations. What did people have in mind when they created places like this, and which important ones have we lost?

People imagined stations as gateways to their cities, as meeting points, as centers of activity. Although 30th Street Station is not in the heart of Philadelphia, for my money it’s the best train station in the world. Just stand under the dust-moted sunlight near the Western portal, gaze at the travertine walls, feel the trains rumbling underfoot—it’s one of the most quintessential Northeast Corridor spaces. The murder of the original Penn Station in New York is the most tragic station loss, but don’t forget Philadelphia’s Broad Street Station, designed by Frank Furness (who designed Penn’s terminal-esque Fisher Fine Arts Library). Broad Street came to seem like an overbuilt folly when downtowns were hemorrhaging residents and commerce, and it too was demolished. Nor should we overly glamorize some of these lost terminals. Many people criticized the original Penn Station as an architectural White Elephant, and later for its grime-coated windows and seedy atmosphere. It wasn’t always as great as we might like to think. On the other hand New York’s Moynihan Train Hall, created from Penn Station’s grand postal companion, has its critics, but the first time I walked up that escalator and looked at the skylight, it took my breath away.