Book Review: Riding the Bell

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Okay so you think you have seen this book reviewed on this site before, and you are right! This book deserves a second nod because it covers some important local railroad history in my neck of the woods in Lehigh Valley, PA. And the author is a friend and passionate fan of trolleys, buses and the “Liberty Bell Limited” that served the three connecting cities of the Lehigh Valley, PA with runs to Philadelphia. The Liberty Bell was owned and operated by the Lehigh Valley Transit Company, it met the same fate that other trolley systems experienced namely the car in every driveway and our robust expansion of the highway system. The author Ron Ruddell spent 10 years patiently researching the material and writing a lively text that accompanies numerous photos and illustrations. Some densely populated cities in the United States have brought back the trolleys but here in Eastern Pennsylvania a trolley system that provided transport to rural and city dwellers is long gone, books like this help us preserve the history of the interurban rail systems in cities like our’s in the Lehigh Valley.