David Alff is Associate Professor of English at The State University of New York, University at Buffalo. This interview is based on his new book, The Northeast Corridor: The Trains, the People, the History, the Region (University of Chicago Press, 2024).
JF: What led you to write The Northeast Corridor?
DA: I wrote Corridor during the pandemic. I missed many things in quarantine but longed most for train travel. I missed the thrill of departure, the relief of arrival, and the sense of sharing space with far-flung people in between. And I especially missed the countless tactile experiences that make up transit: the sizzle of high-tension copper catenary, the pungency of creosote slathered on wooden ties, the cherry-almond scent of Amtrak soap, the stick of pleather seats, the look of 30th Street Station in winter sunlight and the smell of Trenton ballast after summer rain. I wanted to share these things with other people. And so this led me to write a history of one railroad and the place it formed.
JF: In 2 sentences, what is the argument of The Northeast Corridor?
DA: The northeast corridor is the busiest and fastest passenger rail line in North America. So important are the tracks linking Boston, Providence, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington that the word “corridor” has grown synonymous with the region it serves.
JF: Why do we need to read The Northeast Corridor?
DA: Most corridor commuters have no idea that their trains blast over bridges raised when Andrew Jackson was president, careen around curves embanked by Civil War veterans, and plunge through tunnels older than the Titanic. Few riders would suspect that their coaches cross timeworn rights-of-way that once held colonial post paths and indigenous trails. My book shows how today’s trains follow a lot of footsteps along some deeply rutted ways.
Those ancient ways are now undergoing radical change. The corridor is currently the site of four of the country’s largest infrastructure projects: the digging of the Frederick Douglass Tunnel under Baltimore, the erection of a new Susquehanna River Rail Bridge, the replacement of Kearney, New Jersey’s decrepit Portal Bridge, and the boring of new tunnels under the Hudson River. Given all this activity, now seems like a good time to learn about the railroad we have inherited from 200 years of industrial history.
Corridor is appearing at a moment that mixes optimism and anxiety: a time when people wonder whether the country’s fraying infrastructural quilt will hold together for future generations or suddenly collapse, like the Key Bridge into Baltimore Harbor; a time when regional identity holds existential political weight. We need more transportation history because how we got to here has a lot to do with where we’re going.
JF: Why and when did you become an Am​erican historian?
DA: I’m not a historian! My PhD came from an English Department. If anything, I’m a literary critic who tries to make sense of the past by reading its surviving texts. I do believe that criticism has much to offer history insomuch as it trains you to notice the world, whether that world presents as words on a page or the patterns of dwelling and motion that shape an environment.
The Northeast Corridor wagers that one of the best ways to grasp giant macro phenomenon like infrastructure, logistics, and regionalism is to read the discrete documents they leave behind, and to consider how those documents use the resources of language to talk about the world. My book builds its account from poems, songs, statutes, track diagrams, musical pageants, patents, operating manuals—an avalanche of words, numbers, and images. As a work of historical non-fiction, Corridor is both an analysis of events and an act of story-telling—explanation cut by show-and-tell.
JF: What is your next project?
DA: I am writing a monograph called Rights of Way. It traces the conceptual origins of infrastructure to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century debates over the legality of passage, and specifically to what Judge William Blackstone called the “right of going over another man’s ground.” I argue that by reading the laws, charters, contracts, and verdicts that established legal ways in early modernity, we can better understand the fabric of tracks, pavements, wires, pipes, sea lanes, and flight paths that define our built world today.
JF: Thanks, David!