railway sleepers!

big-all said:
modern trains have retension toilets
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Didn't know that (not rich enough to use trains these days :wink: ).

I do remember once using the khazi on a Belgian train - no s-trap, just a pipe straight down to the track - **** me was it draughty!

Re sleepers, I think they were once an interesting thing to use, when they were unusual and cheap, but have now had their day. Hard to work, bound up with safety concerns and no longer cheap, no longer different. Why bother?

Heard an interesting story years ago when I went on a trip round Battersea Powerstation, before it was vandalised. When it went out of use, various contracts were let for the demolition/removal/whatever of various bits. In the chimneys were huge baulks of teak (I think) which were there to make the water that was poured in at the top bounce around and get uniformly distributed to cool the smoke and wash out the ash. So this wood had been in a hot, wet, dirty, smokey environment for decades, and the contract to remove it went to the guy who charged them the least. They all thought the wood was useless, but this guy knew that once he'd machined off the outer layer, the stuff underneath would be perfect, and worth a fortune....
 
Hi, I'm a newbie to this forum and this thread's fairly old but here's my two penneth anyway.

I've recently cut up a Jarrah-wood sleeper. If you do a Google search on 'Jarrah', you'll get some interesting stuff. It's a lovely rich red colour. I believe that the sleepers on the London Underground are (were ?) Jarrah.

I went over mine visually and with a metal detector before starting to cut and found and removed several nails and screws. I then removed the skin with an old electric planer. The preservative had only penetrated a millimetre or so, under which the wood was clean.

I didn't use a chainsaw, I started with a TC-tipped hand circular saw from each side, then took a coarse-pitch hard-point handsaw to the remainder to join the two cuts. I divided the sleeper into three pieces that way.

I then realised two things: first, that the pieces were now light enough for two of us to handle over the table-saw; second, that the table-saw has a bigger blade than the electric handsaw so it could cut more than halfway through the thickness of the sleeper (5"), avoiding the need to finish the cut with the hard-point handsaw.

Big Snag - Caution Needed! This means I had to remove the riving-knife and saw-guard from the table-saw and to be extra, extra careful, e.g. using two push-sticks to keep hands clear of the blade.

We (i.e. SWMBO and I) have managed two more cuts this way but still have a further two cuts to do.

Before getting the timber anywhere near the saw for each cut, inspect again for nails or other 'nasties'.

There is some very useful hardwood locked up in some old railway sleepers. But if this encourages anyone else to have a go, please, please take all the safety precautions.
 
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