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Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) will introduce a long-awaited rail bill on Dec. 15 that expands the Surface Transportation Board and adds several provisions that could give shippers more choices of rail carriers, committee officials said.

Today’s new diesel-power trucks are, by law, equipped with particulate filters, and in many models the DPF will soon will be joined by another aftertreatment device — selective catalytic reduction, or SCR, in a canister.

In a local newspaper, I recently read an editorial titled: “Truckers Should Not Be Texting While Driving.” The writer improperly quoted statistics and singled out the trucking industry as the problem.

This has been a year when so-called “good news” actually has come in the form of less-bad news, as in “freight levels fell less last month than they did the month before” or “fewer jobs were lost last week than the week before.”

President Obama last week proposed directing about $50 billion in unspent money from the federal government’s bank bailout program to build roads and bridges, as a way to counter high unemployment.

Early in 2008, when forecasts called for a continued, long-term rise in ocean shipping activity, many maritime companies accelerated the building of new vessels and leased as many containers as they could obtain.

Former American Trucking Associations chairman Patrick Quinn, an executive of U.S. Xpress Enterprises, has returned to a leadership role with the federation, succeeding Robert Davidson as the organization’s treasurer on Dec. 7 for a 10-month term.

FedEx Corp. said it will raise Ground and 91��Ƶ Delivery rates by an average of 4.9% in 2010 and also reported that its fiscal second-quarter earnings will be higher than Wall Street expectations, mostly because of volume growth.

Donaldson Co., a manufacturer of filtration systems, said Monday it is spending $5 million to enable one of its plants to manufacture parts that comply with the Environmental Protection Agency’s 2010 diesel emission standards.