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More importantly for the future of Bethlehem, however, was the decision by Asa Packer to locate the headquarters of his Lehigh Valley Railroad at its southern terminus in Bethlehem rather than in his home community of Mauch Chunk. In 1855, the railroad began service between Mauch Chunk and Easton. A railroad linking Easton to Philadelphia had been operating since 1852. In 1857 the North Pennsylvania Railroad was completed as a link between Bethlehem and Philadelphia. Soon after completing his railroad, Packer became involved in the iron boom. The Lehigh Valley has an abundance of iron ore and limestone, two of the three ingredients needed to make iron. White and Hazard hoped that anthracite coal could be substituted for the charcoal that fueled the furnace. In 1839, with the help of a Welsh ironmaster, David Thomas, they succeeded and initiated an iron boom which would make the Valley the center of the nation's iron industry for decades. His railroad, in addition to hauling coal, also served the many iron furnaces and mills in the region. Asa Packer established the Bethlehem Iron Company to provide rails for his railroad. With this symbiotic arrangement the iron company prospered and soon became the dominant industry in Bethlehem.[4]
Whereas the Moravians had carefully segregated communal and religious spaces away from the noisome industrial quarter, "Augusta," later "Wetherill" and "Bethlehem South" soon showed itself a typically industrial agglomeration of wooden dwellings, coal and lumber yards, rail facilities, tanneries, zinc, brass, and iron works, and churches. On the Stobridge and Company's 1873 map several locomotives are shown lumbering to and fro across city streets. By this time fifty seven trains per day rumbled through the town. For those residents of the Valley accustomed to rural agricultural life, the failure to adjust to the rhythms and dangers of industrial technology could prove fatal. On June 26, 1869 John Frey was walking east on the Lehigh Valley Railroad tracks when "the five o'clock freight train came along at a rapid rate. As soon as Mr. Frey was discovered on the track, the whistle was sounded but it was too late." Still others were killed on the many grade crossings throughout South Bethlehem. The New Street, Third Street, and Cherry Street crossings were the site of numerous fatalities.[5] South Bethlehem was soon becoming a noisy, frenetic place: a place of movement and danger.
