As part of each of the sleeper walls I have been building there are some steps also made from sleepers. I’ve used a kind a brickwork pattern to link them into the main wall.
To give each set of steps extra strength they’ve been packed first with hardcore. What’s not shown here is the concrete that has also been added between stairs to really lock everything together.
Posts Tagged: sleepers
19
Mar 09
Sleeper steps
9
Mar 09
Another wall, another level
Having finished the back level in the garden the next stage was to do the next level down. Eventually this will have a shed and some vegetable beds. For now I just want to get it flat and get the wall up. The wall retaining this level is the same as for the back and upper level – made from sleepers.
First step is to dig another trench 
Then dig some pits for uprights. The sleepers you can see are already buried in the ground for a third of their length. I’ve also added some metal straps for extra support.
Next bolt more sleepers to front until you have a wall:
“No daddy, you’re doing it all wrong”
“Let me show you how to do it properly”
7
Jan 09
Sleeper wall part 2
New year, new wall.
If you read the earlier post on the back sleeper wall you’ll get the general idea. Dig some (deep 
) pis to take some upright sleepers, buried a 3rd of their length. Concrete sleepers into those and then bolt other sleepers onto the front. Simples! Not nice carrying all these up the garden slope though 
Pic of part completed wall
Another angle. Here you can see a recess for steps – more pics of that to follow.
View to the back wall. Still some filling/levelling to do but getting there.
3
Jun 08
Making something . . . at last
It’s taken a while but finally instead of smashing, breaking, stripping and generally demolishing we’ve actually started to build something!! 
Having dug out the bank at the back of the garden we could now move onto building a retaining wall along the back. I decided to make these walls out of railway sleepers. I got a very good price from one of our local timber merchants (perhaps they couldn’t believe how many we needed!!). It’s also much easier for me to build with wood than bricks. Whatever I decided to use the job of hauling the materials up the sloping garden was going to be a pain in the a***, and so it proved.
Anyhow I carried enough sleepers up the garden to make a start. Having marked out I used some sleepers as giant fence posts, burying a 3rd of their length in the ground. This mean digging holes almost a meter deep in the ground. The first foot was easy digging through clay soil. Then came the more difficult ’shaley’ slate. This had to be broken up with a heavy duty digging spike before it could be lifted out. As if that wasn’t enough at the bottom of several holes were large granite field stones (you can see some of them on the right of the 2nd picture). These stones only revealed themselves after I had dug down most of the way – too late to shift the post to another location. More digging . .. . . .
Finally holes were dug and posts concreted into place. Postcrete is great for this – pour a couple of bags into the hole, add water on top and tamp down. Job done. . . .. . .well except for levelling, not easy with posts this size.
I did eventually get all the posts up and you can see I’ve started fixing other sleepers to the front with coach bolts. I’ve also got some metal straps in their for extra support, 300mm screws are also added at ’strategic’ points.
