Dear President-elect Trump,

Congratulations on your win. I know you are pretty much your own man, and that you take advice reluctantly and with a grain of salt.

Nonetheless, I would like to take this opportunity to give you some about rail transportation, and particularly passenger rail transportation. Please don't feel pressured. I'd be perfectly happy if you get all this done in your first term, but I think the first 100 days would be a good target.

To begin with, please appoint an experienced railroad executive for secretary of transportation. The current secretary — Anthony Foxx — is a good man and has loads of experience, but none in real transportation (unless presiding over a small city that has had a few transportation projects is considered real transportation).

I suggest you consider Matt Rose, who is currently executive chairman of BNSF Railway, but has served with distinction in executive capacity in the railroad industry for many years, and is by some considered Warren Buffet's right-hand man. You might not be able to get him. It would be a cut in pay.

However, there are many fine executives to be found in the railroad industry. Such an appointment, I believe, would assist in giving the Department of Transportation a direction that focuses less on the needs of interest groups and more on blanket transportation policy.

And, speaking of transportation policy, you should also consider appointing people with transportation experience to other cabinet posts. Commerce and Interior come to mind, but I wouldn't howl loudly if you chose an experienced railroader for the EPA. It would do the country some good to have someone who understands what it takes to build and run airports, waterways, surface rights of way (road and rail) and other industries, instead of just what they do to or for the environment.

Then, you should sit down with all the above parties, and with the ranking committee members of the legislative branch, and decide in your first 100 days whether United States transportation policy is going to be proactive or reactive. I believe it has been reactive for far too long.

Your campaign rhetoric spoke of spending on infrastructure with a focus on job creation. That's all well and good, as we would all like to see good jobs from which the average worker can make a living on a 40-hour week. Repair, rehabilitate and create.

While we can all agree that highways are crumbling across the nation, I argue that investment only in highways for surface transportation is a way to ruin. A coherent surface transportation policy must include rail, and do so in a big way.

I know you will have a fight on your hands with a Republican House and Senate, but we must overcome the conservative knee-jerk that periodically tries to pull all rail funding from Amtrak. The private railroads are overcoming the go-it-on-your-own attitude and getting right with joint and pooled operations and publicly funded infrastructure improvements for private rights of way that benefit all actors in specific regions.

Transportation is just as important for the defense and general welfare of our great nation as is Defense and Commerce. Therefore, I would tell conservatives in Congress that subsidizing rail transportation is their conservative constitutional duty, so wring out the cry towel and get with it.

Once you have put together a bold and coherent transportation policy that includes passenger rail, you must get together with Congress and fashion a long-term, tamper-proof funding plan to achieve the goals of your policy. Pork for special constituencies just isn't going to work anymore.

Perhaps funding needs to come from some controversial sources. Adding federal motor fuel taxes on commercial vehicles appears logical. Trucking is important, but no tax increase would be a free ride for trucks when your new, robust economy starts firing on all cylinders.

Included in that rail funding should be real high-speed rail — not higher speeds, but high speed. It's a big expense, and the only way to do it right is not on incremental improvements, but on new, dedicated rights of way with dedicated trainsets and no interference from slow freight.

I say "slow" freight, because a concept that might work on our vast expanses of western lands is high-speed freight, scheduled and carried in dedicated trains between major break points and at the same speed as passengers.

Mr. President-elect, I think you have vision. We have been mired in the reality of piecemeal grants and funding for passenger rail for so long that it has become the norm. I think you can see beyond it and above it, and can appoint patriots who have the same ability to see above the norm.

Should you choose to take all or part of this advice, I don't want any credit.

I'd just like to see it happen.