FORESTS FELLED BY STEAM

Clutha Leader, Volume XLIII, Issue 33, 24 October 1916, Page 7

FORESTS FELLED BY STEAM

SAW ON A HOSE. | ITS 50 TREES A DAY. - | Deep into the Ercall Woods, sunn* six J miles from Newport, ;i strange little j party of adventurers wandered this morning, and at tlieir coining the pheasants, mightily astonished, scurried into the undergrowth (writes the special correspondent of 'The Daily Mail' from Newport, Salop, lately). I A couple of bronzed, sinewy foresters I with broad axes on their shoulders led j the way. Following came a featherlegged carthorse dragging a SpencerHopwood water-tube boiler attached to which was a weird-looking contrivance of clamped steel which looked rather like a cross between a machine gun and a sewing machine. To this deadly instrument a giant saw was fixed, and behind it there trailed 120 ft of hosepipe. Tliis intruder in these enchanted woods, which disturbed the foresters almost as much as it scared the pheasants, was out on war work—Ransome's "waistcoat-pocket" tree-feller one might describe it. It is tin; " 'cutest" little machine imaginable. Plantations—whole forests—tremble and 'fall before , it; and it came to the Ercall Woods to-' day to give a trial of its labor-saving : and time-saving under Government aus- 1 pices. The trial was completely satisfactory. I NEED FOR TIMBER. ! In England the timber problem has come to a head. Vast quantities are needed, mainly for pit work in the coal minas and trench and transport work . in Fiance. With the pre-war Scandinavian and German facilities no longer available, the Government has had to look at home for its timber, to find means to get it quickly and cheaply. The Home-grown Timber Committee 1 has taken this task in hand with com-' niendabie thoroughness, It has a man- j date over all our historic woodlands, ! and to-day 5)0 forests in England and Wales alone (not to mention Scotland) are muter the battle-axe. All the woodmen and gamekeepers whom the toll of the war lias spared are swinging the : axe, cutting and cross-cutting, and do- : ing their best. _ . But there are speedier, if less romantic, ways than flashing the broad axe. ] There are neater ways, too; and that is why I -was among the brown-skinned men in these whispering glades to-day watching with some heartache the whir-; ring -blade of Ransome's waistcoat-1 pocket forest exterminator wiping out Ercall Woods. j TWO MEN AND A FORESTER. j There is no place for sentiment in these swift, remorseless days. The war has got to be won, though immemorial forests fall. And before high noon Er- | call Wood and all its tall and beautiful j Scotch firs was crashing about my ears j Screaming, the pheasants fled. Two'j men, and one forester born to the! woodsman's craft (to guide the fall of I the giants), are all that are needed to j work this swift and cunning little engine of destruction. The boiler is fed with woodland re-1 I fuse, an 801b head of steam is forced 1 through the hosepipe to work the saw; the little machine can be moved from i tree to treo and can clear a whole acre j without, the heavy boiler being shifted; and each tree is cut through clean,' level with the ground. .There is no waste and no "raggedness'." j A TREE A MINUTE. 1 timed the first to-day as they crashed to earth: the machine sliced through, on the average, a fir a minute, 1 and three minutes sufficed for the stout-1 est giants tackled. Three skilled foresters working at full speed with axe and saw reckon 10 trees as a good day's! labor j this machine, run by a couple' of ; men, will account for 45 or 50. And i I when it has felled the tree it can be ( turned on its side and converted to j cross-cutting with equal celerity. | | It was invented by that famous en-' gineer, the late Mr Allen Ransome. i ; | 'The idea came to my father one morning during sermon time, in church," said Mr Gfeoffrey Ransome a<s we stood