David Alff's "The Northeast Corridor"

David Alff is an associate professor of English at SUNY-Buffalo, where he researches the eighteenth-century Anglophone world.

Alff applied the Page 99 Test to his new book The Northeast Corridor: The Trains, the People, the History, the Region, and reported the following:

My book is a cultural history of the northeast corridor: both the railroad that runs between Boston and Washington, and the seaboard metropolitan region it helped build. This history begins several hundred million years ago, in the Ordovician period, when the microcontinent of Avalonia smashed against proto North America. It ends on New Year’s morning 2021 when Moynihan Train Hall first opened to the public.

Page 99 picks up at a crucial moment in the corridor’s development. It describes Thomas Edison’s construction of an experimental electrical railway in what is today Metropark, New Jersey. I show how Edison’s track drew direct current from his laboratory’s steam generators, and how tourists flocked to Menlo Park for the chance to snag a ride on one of his trains. One journalist recounted how the silent train “shot off like a bullet,” in sharp contrast to the slow percussive build of steam locomotives.

Of my book’s two-hundred-and-eighty-odd pages, 99 is a great place to land. It features one of many passages that describe technological change through story. Drawing on archival research and secondary reading, I try to immerse readers in the details of the past: the crackle of current coursing through iron rails; Edison’s comical indifference to his railway’s frequent wrecks; and the incongruity of the fact that the line terminated beside what is now the fifteenth hole of the Metuchen Golf and Country Club. Such minutiae, I hope, can help us share the wonder that a nation of train passengers felt at dawn of electric railroading.

Beyond my own narrative strategies, page 99 happens to depict a momentous turning point in the history of transportation engineering, as people realized that steam traction was bumping up against physical limits, and faster trains would require remote power generation. Though Edison’s railway was long ago abandoned, reclaimed by forest, and finally buried under suburban tract housing, the technology it tested continues to propel the world’s rapid transit systems and all high-speed passenger trains. The northeast corridor is the busiest and fast inter-city passenger line in North America because its trains receive current from overhead wires (instead of generating it themselves from igniting diesel fuel).

While no single historical anecdote could encompass an infrastructure as wide-ranging and diversely-experienced as the northeast corridor, page 99 offers an unusually representative glimpse into innovations that made the rail line and region what they are today.

Learn more about The Northeast Corridor at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue