The Northeast Corridor

The Trains, the People, the History, the Region

David Alff (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

296 Seiten

2026
University of Chicago Press (Verlag)
978-0-226-84913-3 (ISBN)

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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 Canton, 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.

David Alff is associate professor of English at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He is the author of The Wreckage of Intentions: Projects in British Culture,1660-1730.

Introduction: Greatest Asset

I. Traces
1: A Somewhere-Else Feeling
2: Promising Passage
3: The Great Chain

II. Power
4: A Tale of Two Empires
5: Terminal Zones
6: Wiring the Coast

III. Rust
7: Runaway
8: Flagging through Sprawl
9: The Great Society Derails

IV. Return
10: Improvising Amtrak
11: Battle Lines
12: After Rubble

Coda: Reborn Again

Acknowledgments
Notes
Index

Erscheint lt. Verlag	11.3.2026
Zusatzinfo	20 halftones
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Gewicht	454 g
Themenwelt	Natur / Technik ► Fahrzeuge / Flugzeuge / Schiffe ► Schienenfahrzeuge
	Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Technikgeschichte
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie
ISBN-10	0-226-84913-9 / 0226849139
ISBN-13	978-0-226-84913-3 / 9780226849133
Zustand	Neuware