90 CANADIAN FORESTRY ASSOCIATION 



The things we aim at are, to secure a perpetual supply of the. wood necessary 

 for this large corporation, and it is a pretty large supply that we need. Our de- 

 mands amount at the present time to three million ties annually, five hundred 

 thousand more for new work and one hundred million feet of lumber, and all of 

 this merely for our lines east of Pittsburg and the Erie line. So we have a big 

 corporation as a wood using and producing corporation. We have to find lands 

 which produce the timber we need in enormous quantities, and it is becoming 

 an increasingly difficult proposition to locate such lands to produce our timber 

 supply indefinitely at a reasonable figure. 



NECESSITY FOR PRESERVATION. 



We have found that to economize our supply we must use some method of 

 preserving our railway timber. Timber is adaptable generally to such treatment, 

 and we must reduce our consumption by from one-half to one-third, and treat our 

 ties and bridge timbers, telegraph poles, and other wood products in order to in- 

 crease their longevity. Here are the two big things for all the railroads of the east, 

 and I presume the same problem affects your railroads in Canada. They must have 

 a permanent timber supply to draw upon; they must have it properly managed, 

 and they must preserve the timber by chemical treatment, when using it. There 

 are other things in railroad work. One is planting work to utilize the lands. Any 

 large railway in rebuilding its old lines and in building new lines, acquires farms 

 which are of very little use, and are often not even agricultural land. Obviously 

 then, the sensible thing is to utilize these lands by re-afforestation so as to get a 

 future crop. The Pennsylvania Railroad undertook this work, and we are now 

 planting upwards of half a million trees a year, and already we have two and a half 

 million trees planted. In addition to this we have started a twelve acre nursery 

 so that we may grow our own stock, and with the help of this nursery we intend to 

 try and fix up not only our own lands, but to teach the farmers in the district we 

 cover to do something along the same line. 



There is another thing we have undertaken which I presume should be of con- 

 siderable use to your Canadian railways, and that is the adoption of live snow 

 fences. On our lines near Buffalo we have considerable trouble with snow, and 

 have had to build snow fences. We are now planting along the lines, to replace 

 these expensive wooden fences, strips of evergreen trees which will serve the 

 same purposes as fences, and eventually will cost very much less. 



Aside from this we have in a general way undertaken landscape gardening 

 work, and this department is supposed to advise with regard to the shrubs and 

 trees for ornamental work at stations, and the planting of hedges and other details 

 of landscape garden work. These I think are in a general way the most important 

 points of the Pennsylvania Railway operations. (Applause). 



The PRESIDENT. We all owe a hearty vote of thanks to Mr. Sterling for his 

 exceedingly interesting and practical address. The meeting is now open for a 

 general discussion on the papers which we have heard. 



DISCUSSION. 



Col. LOGGIE. I do not intend to keep you very long, but there are one or two 

 points in Mr. Bradley's paper that I think need discussion. I come from the same 

 province as Mr. Bradley lives in at the present time. Mr. Bradley is the forestry 



