3&z PRACTICAL ARBORICULTURE 



PLANTING RAILWAY FORESTS. 



By Louisville & Nashville Railway, at Carney's, Alabama. 



It is now a conceded fact that forests must be planted by the railways for 

 their supply of cross-ties, telegraph poles, and lumber to maintain tracks, for re- 

 pairs and construction in the future. 



For every one thousand miles of track half a million cross-ties and more than 

 three thousand telegraph poles are required each year for renewals, for which 

 there is paid annually $3,000,000 for materials, besides having long distances to 

 transport them, and a great expense incurred in labor of renewing. 



With the timber now available in the entire United States, even if its supply 

 could be continued, which is impossible under existing conditions, this drain upon 

 the resources of transportation companies must ever be continued. 



The expense to the companies in twenty years, for renewals alone, will be 

 three million dollars for each one thousand miles of trackage, or three-quarters 

 of a billion dollars for our present railway mileage. 



Conservative engineers and railway officials in many portions of the United 

 States have concluded that it is good economy to prepare at once for the inevitable 

 result which it is apparent is near at hand, the final end of American forests, and 

 to plant other forests for supplying these needs. 



Among the railways which have begun the actual planting of trees on a large 

 scale, the Louisville & Nashville is foremost. Beginning in 1004 with ten medium- 

 sized groves upon tracts of land possessed by the company, it was found that a 

 much larger area of land would be required to supply ties alone that was owned 

 by the corporation. 



The International Society of Arboriculture was requested to select a large 

 tract of suitable land contiguous to the company's lines. 



After an exhaustive examination we arranged for the purchase of one thou- 

 sand and forty acres of rolling pine lands from which the most of the pine trees 

 had been removed, at Carney's Ala., thirty miles from Mobile. 



The land is of a sandy clay loam, well watered, while the meadows or creek 

 bottoms have a deep boggy soil well covered with grass. 



Two hundred thousand trees were planted in spring of i<(o.=; and as many 

 during the winter of 1905-6. Two carloads of trees were used, planting going 

 on all winter. 



The ground was plowed as deeply as the farmers of this region could be in- 

 duced to stir the soil, then furrowed out by running a one-horse turning plow for- 



