Graeme's railway sleeper project

As promised, photos & narrative of our railway sleepers project, attached. As you can see (of course), nobody stole them, so the early delivery worked out fine. For several years, we held the flower bed at the front of the house (roadside) together with some old logs, but eventually these had to be replaced, so we made a retaining wall/raised bed from railway sleepers.
The hardest part was fixing them together: we used 6" nails countersunk in a 12mm hole drilled a little more than half way through each sleeper, but the punch we were using for this bent, and then broke. For a while we managed with a small cold chisel, which had a shank just under 12mm in diameter, but broadened at the tip, so that it kept getting stuck in the holes. In the end I sawed the tip off, and that worked extremely well but I wish I'd thought of it sooner. We made rope slings to lift the railway sleepers at each end, and this made it possible for my wife and I to lift and position the railway sleepers. The job took us all day, from 8am to 6pm, during which it was raining most of the time! We didn't know it when we ordered the railway sleepers, but maintenance work had scheduled on the nearby railway that weekend - lifting and re-laying track including railway sleepers. Our lane was clogged with railway vehicles all week, and the workmen offered us more railway sleepers for free!.
Graeme Macfarlane

RAILWAY SLEEPERS USED:
Used Dutch Oak Grade 2 railway sleepers
2600mm x 250mm x 150mm

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