PRACTICAL ARBORICULTURE 291 
RAILWAY CROSS TIES. 
The inventive genius of Americans has been largely employed during the 
past quarter of a century in an endeavor to adapt some substance or combi- 
nation of materials as a support and fastening for steel rails, and which should 
become a substitute for wooden cross ties. 
The cost of buying ties is not the greatest expense. Transportation often 
becomes a very great factor in estimates. And when to the ordinary transpor- 
tation there is added freight to and from a treating plant, it adds materially to 
the total cost. 
The constant tearing up of the roadbed, removal of the decayed or worn 
ties and their replacement with new ties is the great cost of track mainte- 
nance of all railways. 
When ties can be placed in position and remain thirty-five years as it 
may be when catalpa is used, the cost of repairs will not be ten per cent of 
the present expenditure. This question is therefore of moment to stockhold- 
ers and financiers who supply the cash with which to pay these bills, to know 
that these expenses can be greatly reduced. 
Steel and iron in innumerable forms have been tried; ties of vitrified clay, 
wire combinations; glass, concrete alone and in combination with metal have 
been devised; solid stone and many other substances have been experimented 
with and patents for improved cross ties form a large collection in Wash- 
ington. 
Even before the general public began to realize that timber might be- 
come a scarce article in America, at an early period, engineers and thought- 
ful men were anticipating such scarcity and pondering as to what could take 
the place of wood. But so far there has been no substitute discovered which 
is sufficiently economical, adaptable, and so satisfactory as wooden ties. 
A certain degree of elasticity is essential, where the jars of a heavy rail- 
way train, with the terrible forces which are exerted in side thrusts, espe- 
cially on short curves, for no matter how solid it is thought best to make the 
road bed, there must yet be an elastic cushion beneath the rails, and no sub- 
stance is so well adapted to receive and overcome these continuous blows as 
wood. 
One of the latest designs for ties is a reversed T rail imbedded in cement 
concrete, the rails being bolted to the metal flange of the tie. 
A few such ties have been used, being placed between regular oak sleep- 
ers in the track, and have apparently stood this test, but it is probable if such 
concrete ties were continuous, and required to support the entire traffic, un- 
aided by intermediate ties of wood, that they would soon disintegrate under 
the vibration and jarring of heavy trains. 
In a foundry it is the practice when breaking up heavy castings for the 
purpose of remelting, to let a heavy iron weight fall from an elevation upon 
the metal to be broken. 
The force thus employed to reduce solid masses of metal is very slight 
as compared with that exerted by heavy freight trains moving around reversed 
curves. Often there are two powerful engines pulling in one direction, the 
