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WASHINGTON — Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said the department was working to complete its work on a regulation to ban texting by commercial drivers, and that it would be finished “sooner rather than later.”

Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) will introduce a long-awaited rail bill on Dec. 15 that expands the Surface Transportation Board and adds several provisions that could give shippers more choices of rail carriers, committee officials said.

Today’s new diesel-power trucks are, by law, equipped with particulate filters, and in many models the DPF will soon will be joined by another aftertreatment device — selective catalytic reduction, or SCR, in a canister.

Donaldson Co., a manufacturer of filtration systems, said Monday it is spending $5 million to enable one of its plants to manufacture parts that comply with the Environmental Protection Agency’s 2010 diesel emission standards.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency last week declared that greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles and industrial facilities are a danger to human health, a first step the agency must take along the path to regulations limiting the levels of combustion by-products from tailpipes.

Charles “Shorty” Whittington, immediate past chairman of American Trucking Associations, was among the officials who stressed to the Obama administration the importance of investing in the nation’s roads and bridges during the president’s recent Washington jobs summit.

The California Air Resources Board last week began to look into changing the state’s diesel emissions rule, which could give truckers hit by the recession more “flexibility” or even partial delays of one or two years in complying.

Former American Trucking Associations chairman Patrick Quinn, an executive of U.S. Xpress Enterprises, has returned to a leadership role with the federation, succeeding Robert Davidson as the organization’s treasurer on Dec. 7 for a 10-month term.