home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search
- <text id=89TT3231>
- <title>
- Dec. 11, 1989: Business Notes:Transportation
- </title>
- <history>
- TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1989
- Dec. 11, 1989 Building A New World
- </history>
- <article>
- <source>Time Magazine</source>
- <hdr>
- BUSINESS, Page 79
- Business Notes
- TRANSPORTATION
- All Aboard? Not Quite
- </hdr><body>
- <p> Though long-haul passenger trains in the U.S. have been
- equipped with toilets since before the Civil War, they went on
- dumping effluent right onto the tracks until states passed laws
- in recent years forcing them to clean up their act. Amtrak,
- however, was given a federal exemption from such regulations.
- The practice has irked railway workers and bystanders, who have
- sometimes fallen afoul of the raw waste from speeding trains.
- </p>
- <p> In the first criminal case stemming from Amtrak's dumping,
- a jury in a Florida state court convicted the railroad on four
- felony counts of commercial littering. When sentencing takes
- place, Amtrak could be fined $20,000 for its offal offense. The
- railroad, which planned to appeal, said it would halt service
- in Florida if the decision is upheld. Amtrak defended its foul
- trail as merely an "aesthetic" problem.
- </p>
-
- </body></article>
- </text>
-
-