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Bethlehem was well served by several railroads, connecting the city to the nation's centers of capital and culture. Philadelphia Quaker capitalist and founding partner of the Bethlehem Iron Company, Joseph Wharton routinely traveled the North Penn Railroad to attend board meetings during the 1870s and 1880s.[6] By the 1890s, healthy brinksmanship had developed between the two New York-oriented railroads in town, the Lehigh Valley and the Central Railroad of New Jersey. Maintaining ornate stations on either side of the Lehigh, the two railroads competed for both New York and the growing tourist trade. Both railroads served the upper Lehigh and Pocono regions and, unlike most eastern railroads serving commuter and long-haul passengers, these railroads produced elaborate tourist guides to induce patronage. The Lehigh Valley Railroad encouraged middle-class families to visit Mauch Chunk's famed Mount Pisgah, where an inclined railroad allowed unparalleled views from the summit. The Lehigh Valley further embraced advertising and engaged the services of Philadelphia photographer William H. Rau to popularize its well-maintained trackage, its innovative engineering feats, and its stable of modern locomotiveslike the "Asa Packer" and "John Wilkes"employed in New York to Buffalo service.[7]
One technology, the electric trolley car, introduced about 1890, created an efficient interregional and interurban transportation network that enabled easy mobility throughout the Lehigh Valley and beyond. On any given night in the late 1920s an Allentown couple could hop a streetcar to the Pergola theater at 9th and Hamilton to take in a film. Walking one block up to 8th and Hamilton, one would suddenly be at the hub of city, rural, and interurban trolley lines. During the warmer months passengers could ride the Allentown and Reading Traction Company's exclusive line to Dorney Park. Via advertisements, posters, and films the Lehigh Valley Transit Company urged residents to use its service to enjoy the isolated beauty of the Delaware Water Gap. Also heavily utilized in the decades before the opening of the Northeast Extension of the Pennsylvania Turnpike was the Lehigh Valley Transit Company's "Liberty Bell" trolley route to Philadelphia. For $2.10 round trip during the week Allentowners could travel to Block's Department Store in Norristown or continue on the tracks of the Philadelphia & Western Railroad to 69th Street Terminal in Upper Darby, on the outskirts of Philadelphia. In 1940, this trip took roughly an hour and fifty minutesfar faster than any other mode of transportation. And much like the private bridge builders of the early 18th century, the Lehigh Valley Transit Company constructed its own elegant reinforced concrete spanthe Eighth Street Bridge at a cost of a half million dollars to carry its trolleys over the Little Lehigh River. Much like its ancestors, the bridge charged a fee to cross. Interregional trolley transit was reasonably well developed and extensions of Lehigh Valley Transit Company's system spidered out northwest to Slatington, northeast to Nazareth, east to Bethlehem, south and west to Macungie and Emmaus, and farther east to Easton via connections.[8]
