RAILWAY SLEEPERS

Evening Post, Volume CXX, Issue 141, 11 December 1935, Page 22

RAILWAY SLEEPERS

A CREOSOTING WORKS

GREAT WESTERN RAILWAY

(From "The Post's" Representative) LONDON, November 23. The Great Western Railway Company announces today the opening of its new sleeper creosoting works at Hayes, Middlesex, covering an area of nineteen acres. The new works have been designed to deal with half a million sleepers annually, and to enable the whole of the operations of impregnating and preparing the sleepers ready for the track to be carried out under cover. The works have been equipped with the latest time and labour-saving devices, electrically-driven conveyors being used to bring the various materials together, to pass the sleepers along through the adzing and boring machines, and through the ■ chairing machines, and finally out to the special wagons into which they are dropped ready for dispatch to various parts of the system. The adzing and boring machine is capable of dealing with one sleeper every ten seconds, during which time the bolt holes are bored and the necessary grooves cut: out in the sleeper face to match those on the two chairs. From this machine the sleepers pass on a special train of trolleys into a cylinder in which they are impregnated or "pickled" with creosote under a pressure up to 2001b per square inch. The two new cylinders provided for this purpose are the largest in the country, being ninety feet long with an inside diameter of just under seven feet. Each is capable of holding about 660 sleepers at a time. Working tanks are provided to each cylinder, in addition to storage tanks, having a total capacity of about 65,000 gallons of creosote, and it is expected that, at full output, the consumption of creosote, will be in the region of one and a half million gallons annually. From the cylinders the sleepers pass on to the chairing machine where the chairs are not only bolted on to the sleepers, but set to gauge ready for laying in the line. Provision is also made at the new works for a stacking yard to hold about 750,000 sleepers for seasoning, and three five-ton steam travelling cranes are available for unloading the sleepers from the barges and carrying them to the stacks, or from the stacks to the covered creosoting and chairing plant

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