Finally, the DM&E railroad project is headed for the independent review it needed long, long ago.
Under legislation introduced in both the U.S. House and Senate, Congress will have to sign off before the DM&E can receive the $2.3 billion federal loan it needs to lay high-speed rail from Wyoming to Winona (and right through downtown Rochester). Unlike the industry-friendly Surface Transportation Board and Federal Railroad Administration, Congress is likely to focus on key questions:

Does this coal-hauling enterprise really offer public benefits that justify fronting it more taxpayer money than the Chrysler bailout -- creating, as one former rail regulator has put it, an island of socialism in a sea of free enterprise? If so, can the still-dinky DM&E repay such debt? What about that shaky safety record?

Above all, why shouldn't DM&E accommodate the reasonable objections of Rochester and the Mayo Clinic by routing a new line around the heart of Minnesota's third-largest city?

We have been skeptical on the first three questions, in the absence of the usual public hearings, but resolved on the last: It's dumb to send tankers of toxic material past a medical complex that can't be evacuated in a derailment.

The railroad's response that it's already carrying such shipments over its creaky old tracks is hardly an argument for increasing their number or velocity. Indeed, DM&E's insistence on bullying through Rochester would be farcical but for antiquated U.S. laws that preserve a railroad's ability to do as it pleases in rights of way laid out in the 1800s.

As for DM&E's financing and creditworthiness, we see no reason to be encouraged by Federal Railroad Administration rules that shroud this proceeding with the secrecy of a private banking transaction. And we're troubled by the role of South Dakota's Republican Sen. John Thune, a former DM&E lobbyist, who quietly promoted a tenfold increase in FRA's lending authority and elimination of requirements that applicants show inability to raise private financing.

Without those changes, the DM&E project would have withered. But Congress, by approving Thune's last-minute "earmark" to a transportation bill, set the stage for his railroading friends to make breathtaking use of their various privileges, with taxpayers financing the effort.

Based on the scant information available, opposition to the DM&E project has grown beyond Mayo, Rochester and affected communities to include the National Taxpayers Union, Citizens Against Government Waste, the United Transportation Union (representing railroad workers), FreedomWorks (led by Dick Armey) and publisher Steve Forbes.

Noting the Bush administration's opposition to the FRA's expanded lending authority, Forbes concluded that the loan "at the least" should be rejected because "DM&E manifestly lacks the necessary creditworthiness."

It oughtn't take an act of Congress to derail such a bad idea, but that's the situation. So it's good to see Minnesota Sens. Norm Coleman and Amy Klobuchar, and Reps. Tim Walz, Michele Bachmann, John Kline and Betty McCollum, among others, signing onto measures making it possible.