FOREST FELLED BY STEAM.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXI, Issue 79, 31 October 1916, Page 2

FOREST FELLED BY STEAM.

SAW ON A HOSE. i" Deep into the Ercall Woods, some , six miles from Newport, a Strang' little party of adventurers wandered . the other morning, and at their coining the pheasants, mightily astonish- I Gd scurried into the undergrowth. A couple of bronzed, sinewy fores- | ors, with broad axes on their should- ; irs led the way. Following came a rcather-lcgged cart-horse dragging a rfpencer-HopwOod water-tube boiler, attached to which was a weird-looking contrivance of clamped steel, which , ooked rather like a cross between a mac hine gun and a sewing machine. To this deadly instrument a giant saw was fixed, and behind it there traded 120 ft. of hosepipe. I This intruder in these enchanted woods, which disturbed the foresters almost as much as it scared the phea-, sants, was out on war work-Rand-some's "waistcoat-pocket" treo-fellei, one might describe it. It tjio « 'cutest" little machine imaginable. , Plantations-whole forests-tremble | irid'fall before it; and it came to the ! El-call Woof's to-day to give a trial ,f its labour-saving and time-saving aider Government auspices. The.trial vas completely satisfactory. —Need for Timber.— In England the timber problem has come to .a head. Vast quantities are needed, mainly for pit work m the coal mines and trench and transport lV ork in France. With the pre-war Scandinavian and German iae.ht.es U, longer available, the Government has had to look at home for its timber, to and means to gel it quickly aid cheaply. The H'ome-grown Timber Commit,cee has taken this task in hand with •ommendable thoroughness. It has I mandate over all our historic woodlands, and 90 forests in Englano ana Wales alone (not to mention Scotland) are under the battle-axe. All the woodmen and gamekeepers whom the toll of the war has spared are swinging the axe, cutting, and crosscutting, and doing their best. But there are speedier, it 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 jomc heartache the whirring blade of Ransome's' waistcoat-pocket forest exterminator Mpmg"'■ '' out &rca Woods. i V ' —Two Men and a Forester.— There is no place for sentiment in these swift, remorseless days. Ihc war has got to be won, though immemorial forests fall. And before high noon Ercall Wood and all its tall and beautiful Scotch firs was crashing about my ears. Screaming, the pheasants nod. Two men, and one iorester horn to the woodman's craft (to guide the fall of t% giants), are all that are needed to, work tins, swift and cunning little engine of destruction. The boiler is fed with woodland refuse, an 801 b head of steam is forced through the' : E&sepipe to work the saw; the little machine can be moved from tree to tree, and can clear a whole acre without the heavy boiler being shifted;. and ;i each tree is cut through clean,, level;with the ground. There is no iwasttt.. ijfind no "ragged. ness.';'- :;i'3ifj jbnf! >rmii —A Tree a Minute—--1 timed the' : firs to-day as they crashed to earth: the machine sliced through, on the average, a fir a minute, and three minutes sufficed For the stoutest giants tackled. Three skilled foresters working at full pressure with axe and hand saw reckon 10 trees as a good day's labour; this' machine, run By a couple of men, will account for 45 or 50. And when • - has felled the tree, it cart be turned on its side and converted to cross-cut-ting with equal celerity. It was invented.by that famous engineer the late Mr Allen llansome. "'The idea came to my father one morning during sermon time in church," said Mr Geoffrey llansome as we stood together in the forest watching its swift work this afternoon. "And he was so excited over it that he began to work on the drawings there and then on the fly-leaf ol his Prayer-book."—Daily Mail correspondent.