The Association of American Railroads (AAR), an industry group that represents some of the largest rail freight lines, report that the seven North America-based Class I will be spending $13 billion in 2012 on a number of infrastructure projects, creating some 15,000 jobs. This includes a freight corridor from Southern California ports to Texas and the locations in the Southwest. Nearly one-quarter of all freight cars handled by the railroad company, Union Pacific, commence or terminate their route in Southern California.

The rail freight companies have invested over $480 billion in the rail network over the last thirty years. The rail system is privately funded and no taxpayer money is used in upgrading the network. The AAR report that twenty percent of all rail revenue goes back into maintaining, expanding, and improving the U.S. rail network.

Read more about freight on US railroads here.

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In the House this week the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee has proposed a bill to spend $260 billion over five years on road and transit projects includes a provision that would increase the weight of trucks allowed on US highways from 80,000 to 97,000 pounds. Increasing the allowable weight of trucks on the nation's highway has been debated long and hard with many large companies wanting a change, while environmental groups, some states and now the AAA coming out against a change.

Under current US law the maximum weight has been 80,000 pounds, except for Maine and Vermont where the restrictions have been relaxed to allow 97,000 pound trucks, while some nations, such as Sweden, have much higher weight limits. The Coalition for Transportation Productivity (CTP), which includes companies such as Kraft, Home Depot, and Hershey, believe that 97,000 trucks will educe the overall number of miles their trucks will drive per year. However, heavier loads are a worry for groups like the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) who believe that approximately 25 percent of US bridges need weight limits or restrict traffic because of structural issues.

Read more about truck weights here.

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AT&T has announced the largest order of compressed natural gas (CNG) vehicles by cutting a deal with General Motors (GM) for 1,200 Chevrolet Express Cargo Vans. AT&T has been replacing their traditional fuel vehicles with electric and hybrid, so this is a big endorsement for the GM CNG Express Cargo Van. Currently AT&T has over 5,000 alternative fuel vehicles in its fleet as part of a $545 million project to deploy 15,000 by 2018.

The Chevrolet Express Cargo Vans are modified to allow the V8 six liter Vortec engines to run on CNG at an additional cost of almost $15,000 per vehicle. However the vehicles are not particularly fuel efficient; GM report that the vans fuel consumption is the gasoline-equivalent fuel economy of 11 miles per gallon in the city and 16 mpg on the highway.

Read more about the green supply chain here.

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A report by accounting firm KPMG has found that British public and private sector organizations lost more than £5 million in procurement fraud during 2011. The figure is based on the number of procurement based prosecutions that passed through the British court system. There were seven major cases involving procurement fraud of £5,096,805 (US$7.85 million). Another accounting firm, PwC, says that supplier fraud in the public sector has increased from 13 percent to 32 percent in the last two years

The ways in which criminals have been able to defraud companies include pretending to be a legitimate supplier, and informing the purchasing department that an existing supplier's bank details had changed. Sometimes the criminals are the purchasing staff themselves, as in one instance an employee created a fictitious care home vendor. The employee then linked the care home to a legitimate customer's details to make illegal payments their own bank account.

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