This paper discusses the proposed Alice Springs to Darwin rail, a project that will complete a transcontinental railway linking the southern coast of Australia to the north. It is argued that the railway will constitute a specific kind of place, a corridor, involved in a complex, paradoxical, and, at times, highly contentious gathering, one that embraces both the macrolevel of regional and Federal politics, as well as the microlevel of local concerns and individual experiences. In addition to developing the phenomenology of ‘corridors’, I show that the rail project is deeply implicated in an ongoing resignification of several technologies and their associated cultural regimes. It is also argued that locating the rail proposal within specific historical and social contexts allows numerous crucial inflections and meanings to be understood. In particular, it is suggested that the rail proposal is located at the heart of a contemporary unease and unsettling of Australian national identity and its relationship to the land, an uncertainty that runs hand in hand with a new confidence and, at times, triumphal, rhetoric.
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