Roger Underwood, December 2024.

I had an email from a Queensland mate the other day. “I recently took a train trip from Brisbane to Charleville” he told me, “and there were huge piles of concrete sleepers beside the line to the Toowoomba Range and elsewhere.”

I knew exactly what he was talking about. In September 2024 I travelled by train from Perth to Adelaide, from Ballarat to Melbourne and from Melbourne to Sydney. Alongside every railway line along this trip were piles of “used” concrete sleepers. Some of the piles were very large, containing hundreds of old, failed sleepers. It was obvious that the piles were growing, as I could spot the fresh additions.

As everyone of my generation knows, the railway system of Australia was built on hardwood timber sleepers, cut from our native forests. They were produced in their countless millions, initially hewed by sleeper cutters in the bush using a broadaxe, then cut in sawmills. Iconic sleeper timbers included the river red gum, jarrah, wandoo and ironbark. Jarrah sleepers (and crossings) were so good they also went in their thousands to India and to England. 

As recently as the 1970s, timber sleepers were still going into the great iron ore railways in the Pilbara and the coal railways in Queensland. Laying timber sleepers, and spiking down the rails with iron dogs, and replacing sleepers that had come to the end of their life, was one of the great Australian bush occupations, undertaken by “snake charmers” as the navvy gangs were always known.

Timber sleepers had a lot going for them. They were relatively cheap to “manufacture”, they were relatively light, they bounced rather than shattered if they fell off the back of a truck, and they could be recycled. If nobody wanted a used timber sleeper, nature took care of that. Timber is biodegradable, and the old used timber sleeper gently disappeared, devoured by termites or fungi, or desiccated by wind and sun or converted to ash by a passing fire.

Unfortunately, timber sleepers had enemies. Foremost among these were the “Save the Forest” environmentalists who thought that if timber sleepers were no longer used, the demise of the hated timber industry would be hastened, and our forests would sooner be “saved”. A campaign directed at the various State government railway departments was mounted. This was a wholly illogical and dishonest campaign. For one thing, the environmentalists claimed that using timber for fine furniture or craftwork was not a threat to the forest but using it for railway sleepers was. Needless to say, like so many green campaigns, the fact that it was silly did not matter, and it carried the day.

Railway engineers were also complicit. They had always preferred a concrete (or steel) sleeper to one made of timber, but until they got support from the Greens, they had not succeeded in getting timber archived. To the engineer, concrete offered a significant advantage over timber: coming out of a mould, using specified ingredients and a standard process, the concrete sleeper was always exactly the same (perfect) dimension and exactly up to specification. They would no longer have to rely on timber inspectors at sawmills “passing” or rejecting timber sleepers in an often-subjective manner. The engineers also falsely promoted the idea that concrete was indestructible, resistant to white ants, fungi and the weather, and that sleepers made from concrete would never need replacement.

The reality was different. Concrete sleepers often broke when being unloaded, and then eventually they always failed, sooner or later, especially on railways carrying very heavy loads. It is true that the average life of a concrete sleeper is longer than that of a timber sleeper, but not all that longer, and possibly shorter if we are talking economic life.

Nothing more clearly puts the lie to the idea of concrete invincibility than the view from train windows: an unending litter of failed concrete sleepers lying willy-nilly along the trackside.

Concrete can be recycled – crushed into gravel that can be used as road base – but the process of collecting used sleepers at trackside in remote places seems to be too difficult, because it is not being done. I don’t understand why the same wagons and loaders that bring out the new concrete sleepers cannot be used to take away the old ones, but apparently not. The cost of crushing concrete is also great and energy-intensive. Clearly there is no economic incentive to recycling concrete sleepers at present, or no means of turning them into a profit. If there was, they would not be accumulating.

Old timber sleepers on the other hand are in great demand, especially from landscapers. I have seen whole farm buildings and yards built out of them. Unfortunately, they are a finite resource, no longer being produced. And if the old sleepers were not used, they would simply rot away or burn. When I was a young bloke working in the karri forest, the remnants of the old timber logging tramways could still be found in many parts of the forest. The rails had all been pulled up and reused, and all that was left of the sleepers was a slot in the formation, where the sleeper had once been and rotted away or consumed in a bushfire.

The big push by the greens to do away with timber sleepers and replace them with concrete is an example of misplaced environmental do-goodism going astray. Australian hardwood forests were never threatened with destruction by the production of timber sleepers. This is amply demonstrated by the fact that the forests are still there today, after having millions and millions of sleepers cut from them over the years. Indeed, many of these forests are so nice that they are now national parks.  As every forester knew, as far back as the invention of the railway, both the sleepers and the forests from which they were cut were recyclable.

Apart from being non-biodegradable, virtually non-recyclable and a blot on the landscape, the production of concrete has serious greenhouse consequences (if you are worried about this sort of thing). Data from the Federal Government’s Greenhouse Accounting CRC shows:

You would think that this would be regarded as important by environmentalists in a tizzy about global warming. Not at all. They just redouble their efforts to ban all timber production from native forests, making the use of steel, concrete or aluminium (or the importation of rainforest timbers) inevitable. If it was not so stupid it would be laughable.

Along with the clearing of beautiful forests on the Great Dividing Range to install wind turbines, I regard the replacement of timber by concrete for railway sleepers as one of the all-time examples of environmentalists promoting something that is basically environmentally-unfriendly. The failure to think through the consequences of a policy is truly a hallmark of the ideologically-driven.

I have not contacted railway or Environmental Protection authorities to discuss the fate of the hundreds of thousands of concrete sleepers discarded along the sides of Australian railways. I cannot believe they do not recognise that there is a serious and growing issue out there. Perhaps someone from these authorities will respond to this article and tell me how they intend to sort this problem out in the years ahead. Hopefully they will do so before the outlook from the windows of Australian trains is not a concrete jungle.

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