Amtrak (or carriers, in this case I believe Conrail may be what I meant) can charge money for their services. When I mentioned taxing the goods I didn't mean sending in the IRS and instead I was referring to levying an additional fee for the costs induced by the usage of their service.
The word tax has multiple meanings, and my usage above was indeed correctly utilizing one of those meanings.
Discriminatory pricing on government subsidized rail lines based on pet policy objectives seems like a really bad idea. I would expect there is some sort of legislation on this, we could call it rail neutrality or something.
The word tax has multiple meanings, and my usage above was indeed correctly utilizing one of those meanings.