I have had a large section of lawn removed for access to a car port which has been covered with stone chippings.

This has left me with a grass bank that steps up from the chippings, to tidy this up I want to put a retaining wall in to create more of a feature/tidy the job up.

The height of the rise is no more that 75cm and the earth is very stable as it is old established lawn.

Due to the size of the walled needed I am thinking that this may be cost effective to build it out of new oak railway sleepers. I have about 35-40 meters to do.

Does anyone have any experience of the best way to secure the sleepers in place as I may have to stack 2/3 high?
I think the best way is to drive posts in behind and use a sunken coach bolt to secure?

Will I need to a concrete footing or will they go straight on to a hard-core base.

Any other tips/photos would be greatly appreciated.

Sounds to me like you should be cutting them and putting them in vertical, dig trench and bed them with lean mix ballast like fence posts. You can rough cut and place then, when set cut them level with chainsaw – esp if you have sloping site profile.

Alternatively, on wide face having drilled them and secure with re-bar through them. Lay them like blocks with an overlap.

Don’t like the look ove them vertically and with only 50-75cm above ground sounds like a lot of cutting.

http://www.railwaysleeper.com

They are flippin heavy, doubt they’ll need securing at all. Personally I’d just lay them on hardcore. If you’re really worried, you could lay concrete and drive a metal stake through them into holes in the concrete.

Simople concrete footing say 150mm thick, as its curing poke in some bent rebar… h16 so you have about 750mm poking up. Concrete cures, drill hole in sleepers and lift onto rebar. Fill holes with construction grout.

Jobs a good un.

Good luck with cutting them, especially the old Lignum Vitae ones.

If you’re drilling and cutting, think heavy duty drills and chainsaws, unless you’re a masochist and like manual labour.

Modern ‘sleepers’ are generally specially cut lumps of French Oak and a darn sight easier to handle.

But will still kill your ‘DIY standard’ drill / circular saw.

Rent something big and bloody powerful. You’ll thank me in the end

(Have just had 2 ton of French oak delivered….)

I think they will be a modern sleeper, more than likley oak as it will match the car port.

I got some used ones to build similar, some of them are very heavy, some not so.
I’ve just been using a hand saw to cut them, takes a bit of time [5 mins or so] but not too bad.

tinybits
But will still kill your ‘DIY standard’ drill / circular saw.

Rent something big and bloody powerful. You’ll thank me in the end

(Have just had 2 ton of French oak delivered….)

I only had 500KG of sleepers last year but made up for that with 6 tonnes of gabbion stone that had to be hand barrowed 80m 🙁

RegP

Modern sleepers will be much easier to work with and IIRC about 35 – 50KG each for the smaller ones.

Do you know any body builders / strong men, as it’d be useful exercise for one of them!

We used metal M8 bars with our raised veg patch. 3 sleepers high. Placed bottom 2 levels in place, drilled holes through, bashed bar into sleeper so that went into ground 20 cm and pocked out about 7cm from the top of the second sleeper. Then drilled hole in third layer and placed over pocky out bar.

Get them cut first! We measured them up and had the timber yard cut them up. They are very very hard work to saw.

Drill and pin using rebar (10mm flat bit and patience…..)

If using ‘modern’ sleepers paint the soil facing side with bitumen paint will greatly extend life…..

Built pretty much the same thing about 5-years ago with reclaimed hardwood sleepers, laid them 4 high horizontally, overlapped like blocks. Was laying a patio too so they were on top of compacted type 1 aggregate.

Used metal fixing band at the back to tie them all together & sunk some vertical sleepers into concrete in front of the wall & bolted them to the horizontal sleepers.

I bought a cheep circular saw from Screwfix with the largest diameter blade & RPM, didn’t quite cut through the sleepers so they needed turning to cut from both sides. Cut surprisingly easily & only used the one blade & saw is still going strong. Didn’t want to risk using a chainsaw in case there was any metal in the sleepers.

Back filled with 125-80mm clean aggregate to allow for drainage.

Did it on my own, they were unbelievably heavy! 5-years on, still looking good.