The Northeast Corridor. By David Alff. Chicago, IL, USA: Univ. Chicago Press, 2024, 283 pp.
Reviewed by A. David Wunsch
Ask someone who has traveled by train in several of the industrialized democracies, e.g., France and Japan, and inquire how their rail system compares with that of the United States, and you will get a knowing smile if not a smirk. If your informant is a New Yorker, she might have pointed to a piece in the 24 May 2024, New York Times headlined “Northeast Corridor Train Service Resumes After Outage.” Two nights before, downed overhead power cables completely disabled rush hour train traffic on the Northeast Corridor south of New York City. Service was not restored until the following morning, but even then, delays and cancellations persisted. These were trains on the lines of New Jersey Transit, but AMTRAK trains using the same tracks between Washington and New York also continued to have delays, and this was, sadly, their second disruption of the week, yet another problem due to cables. Notice two facts: a failure of infrastructure (cables), and that there are at least two separate passenger rail services on this AMTRAK rail corridor. Some passengers had been stranded at New York’s Penn Station, America’s busiest rail hub, far into the night.
Ask someone who has traveled by train in industrialized democracies such as France and Japan, how their rail systems compare with that of the United States, and you will get a knowing smile if not a smirk.
Reading Alff’s book provides some historical background to such snafus. The Northeast Corridor, his subject, consists of all the railways and rolling stock that exists on the rails between Boston and Washington, DC. This is the busiest section of passenger railroads in the United States and, in 2019, carried 820,000 passengers per day. The Corridor is 457 miles long, and the trains serve a population of 50 million people.
There is some interesting sociology here: much of the country outside of the corridor regards it as populated by elites, and the corridor’s population went 70% for Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election. Senator J. D. Vance, an Ohio Republican and author of the autobiographical Hillbilly Elegy, remarks in his book, “I’m the kind of patriot whom people on the Acela corridor laugh at.” The Acela is the high-speed train connecting Washington, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. Tickets are expensive and favored by businessmen on expense accounts. Vance’s remark helps explain why the Federal Government is a good deal less generous toward rail service on the corridor than other nations, less imbued with free-market capitalism, and more imbued with central planning, with respect to their own trains. Alff maintains that “[the corridor] wobbles on the brink of ruin.”
Railroads had their start in the United States in the decades before the Civil War primarily in New England. A great stimulus to Boston’s wanting rail service was the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, which aided New York City’s commerce with midwestern states. Steam locomotives had begun to replace horse-drawn vehicles in this era, and in 1834-1835, a steam rail link was opened between Boston and Providence, Rhode Island, known as the Boston and Providence Railroad. The line was intended to be part of a great chain of railways linking the cities of the Atlantic coast. A beautiful viaduct, the longest in the world at its completion, was constructed across the Canton River in Massachusetts to carry trains and is sufficiently durable so that it supports them today. With the new Boston and Providence, Boston merchants could load their wares onto ships sailing from Providence bound for Long Island Sound; they would proceed to New York and then could go up the Hudson River to ship their products West.
After WWII, the coming of cheap gas and massive highway construction sent U.S. passenger rail travel into a tailspin from which it has not fully recovered.
Alff takes us on a history of the railroads that sprang up starting in this era linking the various cities along the North Atlantic United States. He presents some mini-histories of railroads that arose in the northeast in the first half of the 19th century, e.g., the Baltimore and Ohio dating to 1827, the first “common carrier” railroad carrying passengers and goods, the Philadelphia and Trenton Railroad that opened in 1832 and whose terminal never actually resided in Philadelphia, and The New Haven Railroad dating from 1872 whose predecessors The New York-New Haven and Hartford and New Haven merged to create the New Haven.
An interesting aspect of his story describes the requirement for the electrification of trains entering Manhattan. It was an accident in 1902 that triggered the banning of steam: A New York-bound steam-powered train on the New Haven line, the Danbury Express, paused at a cut in Park Avenue in Manhattan, 1,000 yards from Grand Central Station. The engineer put out a signal, including a small charge, indicating that the train was stuck on the tracks. Nonetheless, a second passenger train that had just stopped at White Plains, NY, failed to stop for the signal. In the collision, 15 passengers died on the lead train, and many of them were scalded to death by the steam coming from the locomotive of the second train. The engineer of the latter faced criminal charges and claimed that the smoke-borne smog in the tunnel prevented him from seeing the signal blades. He was acquitted. The Albany state legislature banned coal engines from Manhattan, which meant that the lines serving Manhattan had to electrify, in some cases using a third rail.
This is not the only accident described by Alff. Some were quite spectacular, e.g., in January 1953, a train, the Federal Express, approached Washington DC’s station, its brakes failed, and it crashed at 40 mph through a bumper at the end of its track and landed right in the station, skidding over its marble floor. This was an overnight train from Boston, a piece of engineering of which the New Haven Railroad and the Pennsylvania Railroad were proud. Miraculously, no one was killed.
The 1950s and 1960s were not a happy time for America’s railroads. Ridership declined from a peak in the war years. Penn Station in New York City, a lovely building dating from 1910 and designed by the distinguished firm of McKim, Mead and White, was torn down in 1963. The Pennsylvania Railroad had sold the air rights to the property, and that meant the destruction of the main building of the station, which was replaced by Madison Square Garden and Penn Plaza—a collection of office and entrainment spaces. Railroad activity moved underground. The consequences were so horrifying as to lead to the introduction of preservation legislation and local landmarks laws in New York City. A new station, opened in 2021, basically a waiting room, has been constructed in the attractive James B. Farley Post Office across from the old Penn Station.
The Acela averages only 66 mph on the run from Boston to New York.
The Post Office building is now named the Moynihan Train Hall in honor of Senator Daniel P. Moynihan who fought for its creation and was a friend of the railroad community. The Hall is a handsome building, also designed by McKim, Mead and White and intended to complement their Penn Station across the street. This new station is not without its detractors. To sit there, you must hold a ticket, and the areas reserved for ticket holders are on the inside perimeter of the station where they can watch a large empty floor space. The seating measure is designed to keep “nontravelers” (meaning the homeless) out of the station. South Station in Boston makes no effort to limit seating to travelers from its interior, and though present, they are not objectionable. To reach the trains from Moynihan, one must descend a considerable distance underground in contrast to the old Penn Station where many of the departing trains could be viewed by passengers in the waiting area—an adjunct to the romance of train travel.
If rail travel on the corridor had a golden age, it would be the period during and at the end of World War II. A shortage of gasoline and rubber tires made rail travel mandatory for many, and ridership peaked. After the War, the coming of cheap gas and massive highway construction sent passenger rail travel into a tailspin from which it has not fully recovered. In 1970, when Penn Central, the U.S.’s largest passenger rail service in the Northeastern United States, went into bankruptcy, Congress acted and formed a quasi-public company the National Railroad Passenger Corporation, which was intended to be a profit-making entity. President Nixon signed into law the Rail Passenger Service Act creating the Corporation, later known as AMTRAK, which was quasi-public but which was intended to operate at a profit and whose responsibilities extended to passenger rail throughout the United States. However, AMTRAK never turned a profit, and President George W Bush, a friend of the oil industry and pro-gasoline, tried unsuccessfully to get AMTRAK to sell off the Northeast Corridor in 2002. More recently, AMTRAK has received government funding of nearly U.S. $ 7 billion per year. The Infrastructure Act signed by President Biden made a one-time contribution to AMTRAK of U.S. $ 58 billion, much of which will be used to improve an aging infrastructure and to put a new tunnel under the Hudson River.
The Acela is the flagship train on the Northeast Corridor. Dating from 2000 AMTRAK boasts that it reaches a speed of 150 mph. However, because of the outdated track infrastructure, it achieves this only on 24 miles of track; its real saving in time traveled is achieved by skipping numerous smaller stations, e.g., Bridgeport, a major city in Connecticut. If you want to go from Boston to Bridgeport, you will take the much slower Regional. Japanese trains hit 200 mph on specially built tracks. The Acela averages only 66 mph on the run from Boston to New York. One thing holding it back is the presence of two other kinds of trains on the tracks: freight trains operated by CONRAIL (another government creation) and state-owned municipal railroads that serve cities, which are relatively close together, e.g., New Jersey Transit, which you might use to take a train from Newark to Hoboken, New Jersey.
Much of the U.S. is suspicious of centralized government planning, and despite the benefits of rail’s carbon emissions per passenger compared to cars and planes, AMTRAK is seen by many Americans as a plot of eastern elites.
Will American passenger rail service ever rival that of Japan? Much of the country is suspicious of centralized government planning, and despite the benefits of rail’s carbon emissions per passenger compared to cars and planes, AMTRAK is seen by many Americans as a plot of eastern elites. The conservative columnist George Will remarks that trains are a totalitarian scheme to erode “Americans’ individualism to make them more amenable to collectivism”—in other words, creeping Communism.
Alff’s slim Book is a nice introduction to the history of the Northeast Corridor. It does have omissions: you will not learn much about who made locomotives or whether they were imported in the early days or recently, nor of the advantages of diesel, electric, and diesel-electric engines and when they were used. There is the missing elephant in the room: the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, which led to the construction of 41,000 miles in the Interstate Highway System-a major blow to railroading in America. It cost U.S. $ 215 billion in 2023, which dwarfs the U.S. $ 58 billion obtained by the Biden administration to upgrade AMTRAK.
Reviewer Information
A. David Wunsch is a professor emeritus with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Massachusetts Lowell, Lowell, MA 01854 USA. Email: David_Wunsch@uml.edu.
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