PROBLEM OF THE WEEDING OF TRACKS. ENQUIRY REPORT. DOCUMENT NO. 1

During its meeting of November 5th and 6th 1957, the Control Committee of ORE added the question "Weeding of tracks" to the work programme of ORE, and entrusted the ORE-Bureau with the task of drawing up a preliminary report on this subject. The ORE-Bureau then sent a concise questionnaire to some Member-Administrations of ORE and contacted the specialists of certain Administrations. Information was also requested from the AAR. The data collected--which are the subject of this report--are rather contradictory. In fact, most Administrations apply the traditional method of weeding by contact, and use sodium chlorate or, sometimes, sodium chlorate mixed with other products, and justify this choice by economic considerations. One Administration, however, recently abandoned this method and now uses products based on urea for sterilizing the soil. In this particular case, the very high price of the weed-killer is compensated by a greater effectiveness and by a lengthening of the interval between two consecutive weeding operations. However this may be, there is, at present, no economic and fully effective weed-killer. But, in any case, experience shows that if the same chemical weeding product is used every year, a variety of plants resistant to this product appears, and mutliplies rapidly on account of the decreased growth of other plants. This consideration may induce the Administrations to resort to the alternating or successive use of different weed-killing products or, to another line of action. In short, only the policy that an Administration intends to pursue, the species of plants normally encountered, and a complete economic study allowing for national demands, can definitely decide the choice of product to be used. Moreover, the data collected show that it is possible to obtain a greater effectiveness for a fixed total weeding expenditure, by choosing not only better weed-killing products, but also by improving the method according to which these products are used, and by improving the weeding equipment.

• Supplemental Notes:
  • Restrictions on the use of this document are contained in the explanatory material.
• Corporate Authors:

  International Union of Railways

  Office of Research and Experiments
  Utrecht,   Netherlands 
• Publication Date: 1958-11

Media Info

• Pagination: 32 p.

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Herbicides; Maintenance of way; Tests; Weed control
• Old TRIS Terms: Question d40
• Subject Areas: Maintenance and Preservation; Railroads;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 00052906
• Record Type: Publication
• Source Agency: International Union of Railways
• Report/Paper Numbers: D40/RP 1/E
• Files: TRIS
• Created Date: Jul 8 1994 12:00AM