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....it's called a "fuel tax" and it is a "user fee" tp be paid by the railroads themselves.. To recap, several Amtrak supporters (including TRAINS own Bob Johnston) are calling for "federal investment" in the rail grid that would be matched by the states and private freight railroads. Most of us take this to mean that either the federal general fund will be raided to pay off the lack of private infrastructure investment by the Class I's, or the highway trust fund will be raided for this purpose. Highway users pay an 18.4 cents per gallon federal fuel tax (on top of each state's own fuel tax). If you really want federal investment in the private proprietary rail infrastructure so that Amtrak's true revenues can be further buried Enron-style, then what we need is an equivolence to highway funding. So let's raise the federal fuel tax for railroads to 18.4 cents per gallon and allow the "state matching funds" to also be a fuel tax on railroads. That way, we the taxpayers aren't being duped to subsidize the Class I's. An 18.4 cent per gallon fuel tax on railroads is the perfect way to pay for the infrastructure improvements to the nation's rail grid desired by Messrs. Gunn and Johnston that the Class I's themselves are loathe to do themselves. Better yet, let's raise it to 50 cents a gallon and use part of the money to rebuild abandoned rail lines that are deemed essential to local economic development, and use other parts of the money to compensate state and local highway districts whose roads are experiencing increased wear and tear from increasing truck traffic that has resulted from branchline abandonments or just plain refusal of service. I expect the AAR to support this proposal, as they are currently running an ad campaign expousing the railroads' ability to take trucks off our highways. Of course, that ad is a bunch of BS, as all the railroads have done lately is to put more and more trucks ON the highways (via abandonments, terminal consolidations, refusals of service, inability to provide service, etc.)
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