AutoCad :: 3D Section Of 2D Polylines

Over the past year I have been working on quickly generating vertical cross sections through 2D lines. I have exhausted all of my connections with fellow AutoCAD users and I still haven't found an efficient solution.

The material I'm working with is a bunch of polylines that kind of resemble branching tree roots from dozens of trees. The polylines sprout from seed points and then branch and cross each other as they move down. I need to generate many vertical sections through the lines. Since the material is composed of lines a slice along a plane would only generate points. I need to take a slice of a volume of lines so that the paths are preserved.

I have tried creating two vertical parallel planes and then using the slice tool on each plane. This would break up all of the polylines at the intersection with the planes so I can manually delete all segments that are not between the planes. This is time consuming, and also leaves room for error when manually deleting line segments.

The ideal tool for efficiency and accuracy would be Section Line. I could create a section line, convert it to a volume, and generate a 3D section with the option to save the section to a new file. The problem with this is that the section tool only works on solid 3D objects. I have considered sweeping a small diameter circle along each polyline to give them volume, but this would take days to weeks of work.

Is there a better tool or method for creating 3D sections of a volume of polylines? Are there any tricks that can be used to allow the 3D section tool to work with the polylines? Maybe I could convert them to a different type of object.

I am using AutoCAD 2013.