234 ILLINOIS STATE ACADEMY OF SCIENCE 



There is located some little distance out from the city 

 of Galesburg a plant which the Academy of Science mem- 

 bers will visit as one of the points of interest. I refer to 

 the tie-treating plant of the C. B. & Q. Railway Company, 

 one of the twelve located in this state, which is seeking 

 by preservative treatment to prolong the life of timber, 

 thus contributing their part to forest conservation. The 

 Burlington railroad not only maintains this plant and 

 buys treated ties and timber from commercial treating 

 plants elsewhere in the state, but it has been foremost in 

 maintaining experimental tracks where the durability of 

 untreated ties and those treated by various methods can 

 be studied. It has demonstrated that the average annual 

 renewal of untreated ties in a track of 15 per cent can 

 be reduced by using preservative processes to about 6 

 per cent. Other roads assure us that where now it re- 

 quires on an average 250 to 275 ties per mile for renewals 

 this figure can be cut, when all ties are treated, to some- 

 thing like 100 per mile. We can not yet give a figure for 

 the total consumption of cross, switch and bridge 

 ties required on the 25,000 miles of railroad in Illinois 

 but we do have data on many of them and know that the 

 normal consumption of one road alone in Illinois is 

 20,000 ties per month. On the production side we have 

 definite records showing that 980,000 ties were secured 

 in Illinois in 1921, and believe that this figure could be 

 raised safely to 1,000,000 ties. Perhaps 500,000 of these 

 come from southern Illinois. 



CONSUMPTION BY COAL MINES IN ILLINOIS 



Perhaps some persons have not thought of wood as an 

 essential in coal production in Illinois but this problem is 

 giving mining engineers some concern. Our own results 

 compiled from answers to questionnaires from 27 large 

 coal companies in this state, combined with material se- 

 cured by the U. S. Bureau of Mines (Tufrt, '23)\ show 

 that on the average close to one-quarter of a cubic foot 

 of timber is required to mine one ton of coal and that the 



1 Tufft, Harry E., 1923. Mine Timbers in Illinois Coal Mines. Reports 

 of Investigations. Bureau of Mines, April, 1923. Department of the 

 Interior. Serial No. 2465. 



