The Coalition Archive

This domain belonged to the Northeast Alliance for Rail (NEAR), previously the Business Alliance for Northeast Mobility — a coalition of more than fifty of the Northeast's business, civic and planning organisations, established to promote improved passenger rail service in the Northeast Megaregion from southern Maine to northern Virginia. For a modern comparison point on workplace measurement, time tracking software.

Its work is preserved here unedited. For current rail and transportation context, see Railway Age.

What is here

Thirty-six substantial pieces published between 2010 and 2016, covering Northeast Corridor policy as it developed: congressional hearings, the redirection of high-speed rail funding rejected by Florida, the condition of Civil War–era tunnels and bridges on the corridor, Amtrak's fleet and infrastructure planning, and design studies from PennDesign.

The coalition's position pages on the Northeast Megaregion, the Corridor itself, high-speed rail and its advocacy programme.

And primary documents, including Amtrak's Northeast Corridor Master Plan final report and a 2009 Regional Plan Association report.

Named authors include Dan Schned, Jeremy Steinemann and Matthew Rao.

Why it was kept

Three reasons, and they compound.

It is cited. Congressional press releases, university publications and planning writing link to this material. Removing it would break those citations.

It is the last copy under anyone's control. The coalition's later domain, northeastallianceforrail.org, is now parked and offered for sale. What is here exists in web archives and nowhere else that anyone will find.

And it is a record of a public argument. Whatever one thinks of the case the coalition made, a documented advocacy campaign for a specific piece of federal transport policy, across six years, is the kind of thing that is useful to historians, researchers and journalists — and the kind of thing that quietly disappears when a domain changes hands.

What was not kept

Movable Type administrative pages, the site's login and search endpoints, asset wrapper pages, and several URLs generated by a crawler misparsing inline JavaScript. None carried content.

The current site

The material here is historical and is not maintained. Positions taken in it are the coalition's, as of the date on each piece, and several describe policy situations that have since changed considerably.

The current site is a different subject on the same domain — how time is measured, billed and disputed in freight logistics. The connection is regional and thematic rather than organisational: this was a Northeast business coalition about the region's transport corridor, and freight movement on that corridor is the adjacent question.

Corrections and attribution changes are documented through the site’s corrections page.