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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 
cf 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 ra‘lwavs which have begun the actual planting of trees on a large 
scale, the Louisville & Nashville is foremost. Beginning in 1904 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, wel! 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 1905 and as many 
during the winte: 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 so‘l, then furrowed out by running a one-horse turning plow for- 
