Railway sleepers....

[jonboy]

Have the chance to buy a quantity of railway sleepers... some kind of pine, maybe 10 ft by 12"x 6"----3000 x 300 x 150mm..they are replacing them with concrete throughout the rail system..
They are pretty good, totally impregnated with oil and of course grit and sand (and probably whatever drops out of the bottoms of trains and train's passengers' bottoms) but cutting up a couple with a chain saw, as initially I was thinking firewood, they are blunting the chain fast...
No wood yard is going to touch them, but the wood I have exposed is beautiful and really I'd like to get some useable planking out of them if I could, instead of just burning them.
Any ideas? I have a pretty powerful hand circular saw, but max depth of cut is only four inches and the De Walt blades that claim to be able to deal with the odd nail, or spanish worm as they call them here, are expensive experiments... Cleaving perhaps, ??

[Hwyl]

I'll do my English American translation "Railroad ties".

Could they be longleaf pine?

[P.I. Stazzer-Newt]

They are in quite big demand in the UK as a fancy gardening resource - a mate found it cheaper to import brand new from France rather than pay the price asked for S/H in England.

I once cut one lengthways with a hand saw - and epic tedious job.

[Paul Pless]

Most of the ones I've seen recycled tend to be oak. Older ones are treated with creosote. I'd be leary of burning them, as coal tar creosote is now considered as a carcinogen and contact in other forms causes a myriad of other health problems. Beech tar creosote on the other hands is a strong laxative. Choose your poison carefully.

[Paul Pless]

I once cut one lengthways with a hand saw - and epic tedious job.

wtf

[jonboy]

I have used them too to make terracing in the veggy patch, but never cut them before....

They are almost certainly native, as there's no shortage of pines here, and the two principle species are the pinheiro manso or Stone pine, that which gives pinenuts, and pinus pinaster, I think the Maritime pine, which was traditionally tapped for colophony resin for industry, but now mostly for timber.... vast stretches of the west coast are pine forest and the trees do grow big enough for timber production... the manso pine is too valuable as a nut producer to be felled but is considered a good wood... probably not sleeper material though... some spruce and fir about too... mostly in the North.

[seedy]

For a while in Illinois they were making them out of walnut.

[peter radclyffe]

buy 10 chains, keep 5 always sharpened, dip the blade in a bucket of oil

[goodbasil]

Leave them whole, build a raft.

[Mrleft8]

Leave them whole, build a raft.

More likely a submarine....

[Bob Cleek]

Hereabouts, they are recycled for rustic landscape edging, retaining walls and the like. Sometimes they are cut up for blocking and cribbing. BUT they are dirty and gritty and pretty worthless if you are trying to cut them. You'd do better to buy new wood with the money you save on saw chains and blades. They are NOT useful for firewood! Most were creosote soaked. They say the smoke is carcinogenic, but whether or not, it stinks to high hell! There's a reason you've got an opportunity to get them for free! That's a lot cheaper way to get rid of them than hauling them to the landfill and paying the "hazmat" surcharges to dispose of them.

[gert]

Don't burn em! You won't like whats coming out of your chimney and neither will you neighbors. Very very sooty.

Only good for landscape ties; except on really hot days... they stink! And don't let the kids near em.

enjoy

[Peerie Maa]

A mate of mine, having scraped the surfaces clean with a scrunting iron (scraper made out of an old file), sawed them up with a tungsten tipped circular saw to make the stock he needed for joiners benches.
Very successful exercise.

The scraping removes the embedded stones, there should not be any nails. Borrow a metal detector to check though.

[seanz]

A mate of mine, having scraped the surfaces clean with a scrunting iron (scraper made out of an old file), sawed them up with a tungsten tipped circular saw to make the stock he needed for joiners benches.
Very successful exercise.

The scraping removes the embedded stones, there should not be any nails. Borrow a metal detector to check though.

But the scraping does not remove ballast (stones) that have fallen into spike holes and become jammed.

And beware of the extra long pieces.....they're for points and can contain extra spikes.

I think the only (bestest) way to break them down is a big rip-saw with tungsten teeth.....and a healthy petty-cash fund for the odd whoopsie with spikes and ballast. Definitely get a metal detector.

I used to be involved in this sort of thing (a mate had the contract to rip up the sleepers in old railyards) and sleepers are dirty, heavy and often not worth the effort, best left for landscaping.

[bluedog225]

Very toxic. I've heard second hand stories of skin rashes and respiratory problems with creosite. Worse with cumulative exposure. City will not pick up due to hazmat regs. Poor choice for veggie gardening and probably poor choice for any environment.

I'd leave them alone.

[Larks]

I used to make and sell some (very heavy) furniture out of old Jarrah ones from the historic Ghan railway that ran between Port Augusta and Alice Springs. Most of that distance was red sand desert so the sleepers were impregnated with it and I went through a lot of saw blades and planer blades but it came up beautifully when finished. Very hard work but worth it!

I also used them for lintels in my first house, which was mud brick. Rather than mill them I stripped all of the old surface timber off with a coarse grinding disk back to nice red wood, leaving an uneven but eventually smooth surface that also varnished up beautifully.

I have also used creosoted pine sleepers for lintels, doing the same - grinding back the creosote using a coarse disk until the pine showed through and then varnishing them, but that was bloody toxic and nasty work. I shudder to think what I have inside me these days from that work using only a dust mask!!