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The map in the article shows a proposed route going from Siberia through Alaska and Canada ending in New York. The problem is that there are huge engineering problems facing anyone trying to built that route and it would likely be more expensive than the Russian portion. Currently there is a sea link between Whittier, Alaska and Prince Rupert, Canada where there is a link to the CN rail line. A more direct route through the Yukon would be prohibitively expensive although perhaps this is what they need to open up the Yukon and Alaska economies.

It would be icing on the cake for the Canadian railroads. Canadian National is truly a full transcontinental railroad, connecting Prince Rupert and Vancouver to the Atlantic (through the Great Lakes, Halifax and Montreal), plus New Orleans and Mobile, AL. Check their system map out.

That seemed like a rather large dollar amount. So I looked up CN's annual report (2004). It says that CN's total operating expenses amounted to $4,380 million in 2004. Hmm, that's 4 billion. I guess I don't understand accounting somehow.

No, just a bit further down, they say that the fuel costs were $528 million (8% of operating costs, which is typical for transportation companies).
So I don't know where he is getting that $11 billion number from.

Here are some little suggestions.

How about comparing modern day cars, trains, busses, and planes, on a per-passenger basis?

According to Top Gear a few nights ago, trains get worse mileage than the average car, per passenger(I'm trying to find any info about the study online to see if that's based on maximum capacity of each type of vehicle or real-world average passenger counts) and a high speed train gets worse mileage than a jumbo jet!

For freight there's no doubt that diesel locomotives are the winner. Diesel locomotives are hybrid vehicles: a 2-stroke diesel generator, but electric motors. They are very efficient at moving large loads, not so good at light loads due to the weight of the loco itself (something like 135 tons). That's why passenger trains tend to be purely electric - to keep the huge weight of the generator off the train.

Here are some links:

HowStuffWorks article on diesel locomotives.
A CN Railroad page claiming a diesel locomotive can travel 3.5 times further than a truck on a gallon of fuel (presumably pulling equivalent loads).
A BNSF Railroad page claiming fuel efficiency of approx. 750 GTM (gross ton miles) per gallon. Most high efficiency cars would probably weight a ton or less so a 50 MPG Prius would be about 50 GTM per gallon.

Large Railroads of North America:
Union Pacific
Burlington Northern Santa Fe
CSX
Norfolk Southern
Canadian National
Canadian Pacific
Kansas City Southern
And then there's Dakota, Minnesota & Eastern, which wants to became a bigger player in the transportation market through their proposed powder river expansion project

And it's all run without your tax dollars.

• National Australia Bank Click "Register Now" and you get a "Your Browser Version is not supported"
• CN Rail North America's Railroad (Excluding non-NS6 users).
• Bank Of America Try to apply for a gold card and the form gets screwed up.
• Benjamin Moore Sorry our page is designed for IE only, buy your paint elsewhere.
• Novartis Screwed up rendering.
• Connectsite Exchange, Collaborate, Connect! Unless of course your using a non IE browser, then go away.

This isn't counting the 1720 Tech Evangelism bugs that have already been resolved. Sites like salomonsmithbarney.com, yahoo.com, cbs.com, citrix.com and many many more have all resolved improper coding issues that screwed up non IE rendering. But the positive news is that in 1720 cases web administrators have changed their websites to make them unbroken.

Here's an example. One of the most highly reported bugs (bug 114812) that has since been fixed was with hotmail. Due to faulty javascript implementation if you would select the "ALL MESSAGES" box in your inbox only one message would actually be selected, so to delete the mountains of spam that accumulate daily you had to click the box beside _each_individual_message_. Clicking 200 checkboxes after not checking your mailbox for a few days does not a fun time make. Anyway after about 6 months of pestering microsoft finally fixed it. The moral: If complaining can make Microsoft make its pages standards compliant well the sky's the limit.

Anyway if you want to do something to help check out Mozilla Evangelism The site is chock full of advice about how to report and deal with non-compliant websites. You can even use the Letter Writing Tool to write and send a nifty letter to website administrators who haven't yet seen the light. Obviously the site is geared to getting things to work properly in Mozilla, but the fact is, things tend to work in Mozilla if they are standards compliant.