Mr. Easter, the $1,600 is a snapshot of one year, 2004, when the railroads moved 24 million tonnes. The $4,300 is a construction of what would have been the cost 15 years ago in a year that had 35 million tonnes. The difference between those two is what equates to $2 a tonne. If you believe those numbers, you would be agreeing to the construct that 65% of the costs were not there. The difference between $1,600 and $4,300 is a 65% reduction.
The reality is that you cannot look at maintenance costs in a one-year snapshot. That's not the right way to do it. Second, if you do it, you have to do it on a volume-adjusted basis. The government, in its own report at the CTA, has taken the $4,300 down to $3,600. And we don't actually agree with that number either, but the last official number is $3,600, not $4,300. The $1,600 was never adjusted for volume; these are taken, in a misleading fashion, from bits and pieces of reports. If you agree with the construct, you would find a difference that is very much smaller than what has been discussed.
But the whole thing is largely irrelevant; we're trying to reconstruct something that took place 15 years ago. The government has decided to move away from item-by-item costing to one where we have a revenue cap that governs the revenue generation for railroads. They did that twice. They did it once, when they instituted it; they took it down by 18% in the early 2000s to provide efficiency for the farmers. What we have today is far lower than what's being paid everywhere else in the world.
So to single out one item is highly misleading.