Has anyone made raised beds out of railway sleepers.Any advice or details of
what you did wellcome.

Thanks

Roy

In message , roy king
writes
Has anyone made raised beds out of railway sleepers.Any advice or details of
what you did wellcome.

Yes. Don't use the ones treated with creosote or similar substance.
Tannilised (sp?) are best. Our own dear Cormaic gave me some excellent
advice when I put mine in a few years ago.
--
June Hughes

June Hughes wrote:
In message , roy
king writes
Has anyone made raised beds out of railway sleepers.Any advice or
details of what you did wellcome.

Yes. Don't use the ones treated with creosote or similar substance.
Tannilised (sp?) are best. Our own dear Cormaic gave me some
excellent advice when I put mine in a few years ago.

I'm not scared of creosote. And if you can still get railway sleepers (I
believe what there are mostly come from eastern Europe), I'm sure that's
what they'll have been treated with. Fresh timber will be tanalised, but
you'll pay the new price.

--
Mike.

"Mike Lyle" wrote in message
...
June Hughes wrote:
In message , roy
king writes
Has anyone made raised beds out of railway sleepers.Any advice or
details of what you did wellcome.

Yes. Don't use the ones treated with creosote or similar substance.
Tannilised (sp?) are best. Our own dear Cormaic gave me some
excellent advice when I put mine in a few years ago.

I'm not scared of creosote. And if you can still get railway sleepers (I
believe what there are mostly come from eastern Europe), I'm sure that's
what they'll have been treated with. Fresh timber will be tanalised, but
you'll pay the new price.

I have used macrocapa and gum sleepers (not railway sleepers, smaller than
that) for raised gardens. The wood is untreated but is thick enough to last
20 years most likely. I built the gardens along existing fence lines and
nailed a backing to the fence to contain the soil and stop the soil rotting
out the fence. Something like hardiplank/fibrolite is best although you
could use clearlite roof sheets or probably even good thick polystyrene. If
the wood is heavy enough the sleepers should keep themselves in place. If
worried about movement you can drill down through them and ram some steel
rods into the earth or nail the sleepers together using nail plates. Once
made turf organic matter into them and you are away. They look good, are
easy on the back and a nice way of dealing with difficult parts of the
garden.

rob

On Thu, 13 Apr 2006 12:36:42 +0100, The Invalid wrote
(in article ):

On Wed, 12 Apr 2006 22:10:38 +0100, June Hughes
wrote:

In message , roy king
writes
Has anyone made raised beds out of railway sleepers.Any advice or details
of
what you did wellcome.

Yes. Don't use the ones treated with creosote or similar substance.
Why?

Five used REAL rail sleepers treated with tar or creosote for years in
my raised beds without any problems at all


We used some for our terraced bank, and the first very hot day of summer they
oozed the stuff. The cats walked it in the house, and we got it on our shoes
and everything. We've now had a lot of them replaced with the tanalised
ones, which don't look so aged, but behave a lot better! It probably depends
on your supplier.




--
Sally in Shropshire, UK
bed and breakfast near Ludlow: http://www.stonybrook-ludlow.co.uk
Burne-Jones/William Morris window in Shropshire church:
http://www.whitton-stmarys.org.uk

Unfortunately, the same rules that banned old style creosote also
banned creosote and tar covered sleepers coming into contact with soil.
The risk is apparently one of phenolics geting into the soil. The
legislation is not retrospective, if there are there than that is ok,
but not going forward. When sold a tar / creosote covered sleeper, you
should be asked and sign to say that you are not putting them on soil,
thoug what else you would do with them I know not.
Clifford
Bawtry, Doncaster, South Yorkshire

cliff_the_gardener wrote:
Unfortunately, the same rules that banned old style creosote also
banned creosote and tar covered sleepers coming into contact with
soil. The risk is apparently one of phenolics geting into the soil.
The legislation is not retrospective, if there are there than that is
ok, but not going forward. When sold a tar / creosote covered
sleeper, you should be asked and sign to say that you are not putting
them on soil, thoug what else you would do with them I know not.
Clifford
Bawtry, Doncaster, South Yorkshire

I suppose that, if interviewed by an official puffington, you could say
you were going to place them on an impermeable membrane. In fact, you
could actually _do_ it!

Sally's problem with the stuff getting walked into the house on a hot
day hadn't occurred to me, I must confess -- it sounds like bad luck, as
I've never suffered it. I wonder if a coating of sand, applied in hot
weather, would be enough to stop it.

--
Mike.

On Thu, 13 Apr 2006 21:38:56 +0100, Mike Lyle wrote
(in article ):

cliff_the_gardener wrote:
Unfortunately, the same rules that banned old style creosote also
banned creosote and tar covered sleepers coming into contact with
soil.

snip


Sally's problem with the stuff getting walked into the house on a hot
day hadn't occurred to me, I must confess -- it sounds like bad luck, as
I've never suffered it. I wonder if a coating of sand, applied in hot
weather, would be enough to stop it.


We tried that, believe me! We did look into all sorts of cures but didn't
find one that worked, short of covering them with paving slabs or planks
which rather missed the point. Replacement of the worst ones was the only
option in the end. Also, you can imagine the fun trying to water this bank
with a hose and trying not to get the hose on the sleepers. If we had known
the problem we would have gone for the tanalised ones in the first place, but
hindsight, as they say, is an exact science!





--
Sally in Shropshire, UK
bed and breakfast near Ludlow: http://www.stonybrook-ludlow.co.uk
Burne-Jones/William Morris window in Shropshire church:
http://www.whitton-stmarys.org.uk

"Janet Baraclough" wrote in message
...
The message
from "Mike Lyle" contains these
words:


Sally's problem with the stuff getting walked into the house on a hot
day hadn't occurred to me, I must confess -- it sounds like bad luck, as
I've never suffered it. I wonder if a coating of sand, applied in hot
weather, would be enough to stop it.

Not IME. I had the same problem as Sally. The sleepers I used, had
left the railway at least 30 years before I acquired tham, and had been
weathered ever since. 28 years after I laid them, the top surfaces were
STILL oozing black oil on every sunny sumer day. So, that's at least 50
years since they were last treated :-) They predated electric trains and
I imagine that as well as the creosote used to preserve them, they spent
their working lives being dripped on by engine oil too.

I was thumbing through an old (30-40) gardening book (The NZ Bible, Yates
Garden Book) of my dads the other day and even back then it said do not use
treated timber for vege gardens. The chemicals used in treating wood were
harsher 40 years back however even then somebody was suspicious of the
dangers of chemicals in vege gardens.

rob

George.com wrote:
[...]
I was thumbing through an old (30-40) gardening book (The NZ Bible,
Yates Garden Book) of my dads the other day and even back then it
said do not use treated timber for vege gardens. The chemicals used
in treating wood were harsher 40 years back however even then
somebody was suspicious of the dangers of chemicals in vege gardens.

They were even _more_ suspicious of chemicals back in the 40s and 50s!
Remember the old boys saying "He's no farmer: he uses bag muck"? I'm
seriously pro-organic, but I can see no way in which
preservative-treated timber could do any harm to vegetables growing
nearby.

--
Mike.