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Rail and barge companies will continue to pay a 4.3-cent-per-gallon tax on diesel fuel after the House Rules Committee dropped a measure to repeal it from the Railroad Retirement and Survivors Act of 2000.

Average retail diesel fuel prices jumped 7.3 cents last week to another all-time high, and skyrocketing crude oil prices promise that prices at the pump will continue to rise.

Surging oil prices could bring catastrophic bankruptcy rates to trucking within nine months, according to a stock analyst who has studied the historic correlation between changes in fuel prices and company failures.

The House failed to override President Clinton’s veto of the estate tax bill that would have provided relief to family-owned trucking companies beginning next year.

Associates First Capital Corp., one of the nation’s largest suppliers of credit for trucking equipment purchases, will become a subsidiary of financial titan Citigroup, the two companies announced Sept. 6. he deal is a stock swap valued at $31.1 billion.

To hear vendors speaking at press conferences and trade shows, you would think that new information technologies grow on trees. But their would-be customers in trucking know that to every piece of software, scanning product and communications device on the market there is a dollar sign attached.

The future of the “black box” on trucks will be one of 14 topics discussed during educational sessions at the American Trucking Associations Management Conference and Exhibition Oct 29-Nov. 1 in San Diego.

A Maine trucking company’s long-running lawsuit against “Dateline NBC” over a less-than-flattering portrayal of the company and the trucking industry came to an end last week with an out-of-court settlement.

American manufacturers are recalling 300,000 trucks, buses and emergency service vehicles because of a defect that could cause the brakes to fail.