Salt their fields, not their rails
Used to be, a classic education prepared you for life in the real world. Latin. Greek. Rhetoric. The study of history, so that the future would resemble familiar ground. Or something like that.
After reading a short text in the local news, I realize that we shouldn’t always depend on the wisdom of our ancestors. In the Gaspé, the rail system seems to come and go, with breaks in the scheduling. Be it bad bridges, or poor hardware, the local rail firm seems to come up with a wide range of reasons for staying at home. After a battle against weeds (more of a problem than some realize), someone decided to try an alternative to herbicides.
Back in the time of the Roman Empire, one way of keeping the enemy hungry for a long time was to salt the fields. Not easy, but highly effective. Someone, with a bit of that classical education in his background, decided that salt water would work on weeds. Now, the newspaper text fails to reveal if the wild flowers disappeared, but it did rust the rails.
Rust; a detail. However, the saline solution also “caused problems” with the electrical circuits that control lights at level crossings. Twenty-seven of them. And now, the trains can’t run. Efforts are underway to rinse the trackbed, but methinks that the solution (not the saline) may be difficult to put in place.
I’m trying to visualize the scene in an office, somewhere. The explanation that the salt water was, perhaps, not the answer must have been received with a certain aplomb.
