Word: rails
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Both airlines and highways have dedicated sources of federal funding: gasoline and ticket taxes. Until rail gets its own lifeline--like an extra penny of federal gasoline tax, which would bring in more than $1 billion a year--Amtrak may have to continue "fighting for table scraps," as CEO George Warrington puts...
...many rail enthusiasts, the coming debate is long overdue. "Sept. 11 highlighted an existing problem: we don't have a balanced transportation system," says James RePass, president of the National Corridors Initiative, a nonprofit pro-rail group. "One of the reasons we have government is to do things we need that private business won't. No transportation system in the world really makes money...
That doesn't mean that Amtrak, a creature of pork-barrel politics, is the right entity to revive rail travel. Burdened by the conflicting missions of providing comprehensive nationwide service and making a profit, Amtrak has failed at both. Now many experts are concluding that Amtrak as we know it will probably have to be scrapped--perhaps to be replaced by semiprivatized, regional passenger-train networks...
Members of Congress have proposed a host of bills to fix that, by giving Amtrak and the states anywhere from $20 billion to $70 billion in tax-exempt bonds and loan guarantees. But despite a diverse coalition of passenger-rail supporters, from Senate majority leader Tom Daschle to his Republican counterpart Trent Lott, it's unlikely that Amtrak will control all the funding or that it will survive much longer in its current form...
...German convoy reached the nuclear storage facility at Gorleben last week after a 1,400-km journey mostly by rail from La Hague in northern France, where German nuclear waste had been sent for reprocessing. The train carried six 100-ton, cast-iron casks designed to transport nuclear material safely. Each cask contained 28 canisters of nuclear waste at temperatures of around 400?C. They will remain in an interim storage facility for between 20 and 30 years, so that the waste can cool down to a more manageable 200?C, when it can be permanently stored in a mine...