stepping garden with railway sleepers

[morphe]

Anyone done this?

in the first picture they have railway sleepers, how do they stop the railway sleepers from moving?

http://www.homeandgardenservices.co.uk/sb/show.do?p=additional&n=0&id=SB0001757601000040

Any cheap sites?

found this one but not sure about prices, or is it going to british rail?

 

[masona]

My local timber yard sell them for £15 each and PAR, to get rid of bitumen coated maybe, I would bed them with motar etc

 

[yfs1]

I would imagine you could also drill a hole through then use a sledge to drive a long piece of rebar. Depends on the amount of weight behind them though (I use this method for doing flowerbeds)

 

[breezer]

seen it done on ground force, they said due to weight they dont fix them, but as you will be teracing a garden i would go with yfs1's idea

 

[Thermo]

it depends how high they are. We use them a lot. On low level stuff we lay a screed of post mix just to get the ground level for them and then bed them on that. We then use timber posts behind them concreted in and timberlock screws to fix them in position. If there are corners etc then it helps to hold them all in position. We also timber lock screw down through them all. Gravity does also help a lot as well though!

For single sleepers used as border edges etc we use 2 inch square pegs, 600mm long driven into the ground with the sleepers fixed to these.

We only use rebar on them if its a high retaining wall.
Avoid the reclaimed stuff, they smell, theyre heavy, difficult to cut and work with. We always use either oak or new treated softwood ones.

heres some examples:-

small posts and the steps hold these all together with the timberlock screws

small posts concreted in and timber lock screws for these

steps help to tie the wall in, and they are just pegged at each level. Wall has posts behind and is tied in to the ground with steel threaded rod, concreted into the ground at an angle and bolted throough the wall

 

[morphe]

Hey Thermo, good jobs, looks nice with the wood sleepers.
My Garden is only 16ft wide so shouldnt need to many sleepers. We will probably need to go 1 1/2 to 2 max heigh like your second photo. Did you concrete the posts in behind the sleepers?
How thick of a mix do you use?

will get back to this thread when i get round to doing it

Cheers

 

[Thermo]

in that case i would use 50 x 50 x 600mm timber pegs driven in behind the sleepers. They only need to come up level with the top of the first sleeper. Once thats fixed to the pegs, it wont move and the next sleeper up will be fixed downwards through it. Make sure the sleepers overlap by at least a couple of feet to give the strength in the bond as well.

 

[Dit]

I bought 'sleepers' from http://www.kayser-uk.com/default.asp?contentID=3

They are new, pressure treated pine made to railway sleeper dimensions. I had to order two loads as I miscalculated and therefore got penalised on delivery charges. Professional firm, and the best price for what I was after.

HTH, Tim