Railroad Editorial

[NW Mailing List]

Thought you all would be interested reading this letter to the editor in the  
Hagerstown, MD Morning Herald, 4/29/08
Regards,
Terry Marshall
Trains come out the winner
To the editor:  
I've been following the comments in Mail Call about railroads vs. trucks and  
have to come down in favor of the rail camp.  
The trucks of America used 2,070,000 barrels of oil per day to carry 32.1  
percent of the ton-miles produced in 2002, while railroads used 220,000 barrels  
of oil per day to carry their share of 27.8 percent of the ton-miles in the 
same  period. This works out to a fuel efficiency advantage for railroads in 
the range  of 8 to 1.  
In addition, there is no technical reason for a railroad to need oil for its  
energy; it can use electricity from a variety of sources (including the wind  
farm that supplies power to a modern trolley line in Canada). If we were 
really  desperate, we could even bring back steam engines on certain lines, 
complete  with their beautiful whistles!  
The real question to ask is why our political mis-representatives do not  
embrace this course. It gets even more puzzling as you hear the squawks about  
"subsidizing" rail service (primarily passenger lines; freight railroads pay all 
 their own costs, including taxes on their rights-of-way). Meanwhile, the 
highway  system is badly underpriced (total expenditures on all levels in 2004 
were $148  billion, while fuel taxes only came to $76 billion, supplemented by 
$6.5 billion  in tolls - a subsidy of 37 cents per gallon), and the air 
industry is subsidized  outright on a huge scale.  
Now, I have to admit I've always been a rail enthusiast and have become more  
so as the hassles of driving have increased. But if it is true that our  
political mis-representatives have been bought out by the oil and highway  
interests, then we are in very serious trouble; our American way of life, as  defined 
by some as a driving utopia, has become the American security risk.  
David P. Lubic
Inwood, W.Va. 



**************Need a new ride? Check out the largest site for U.S. used car 
listings at AOL Autos.      
(http://autos.aol.com/used?NCID=aolcmp00300000002851)
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://six.pairlist.net/pipermail/nw-mailing-list/attachments/20080430/9b2fb6d1/attachment.html>