Yesterday’s WSJ had an interesting article on plastic ties. I don’t have a link, but it may still be accessible on their website. IIRC, the article said the plastic ties necessary to lay one mile of track contained 8.9 million recycled plastic bags and 10,800 auto tires. With numbers like that, it wouldn’t take too many miles of ties to make a dent in the stuff going into our landfills.
Has anyone had experience with plastic ties? If so, please share with the rest of us.
Plastic ties are a subject that I have done considerable thinking about over the years. Think of them as just like concrete ties - but with recycled plastic as the binder instead of cement. I do not have any personal experience with the application of plastic ties, but the largest installation of plastic timber I have seen is the decking around Old Faithful in Yellowstone Park. Seems to be holding up well under the tempurature extremes - but the supported loads are not very large.
dd
There have been several test sections out on various railroads and also at TTC that have caused folks to modify the ties. Jury is still out. AREMA & RTA are watching with continued interest. The stuff is better than Cedrite ties, but still has handling and placement troubles along with ballast wear/cutting issues.
Like just about any other plastic material substituted for timber, great in compression, lousy in tension, mediocre shear strength and heavier per unit mass more often than not.
Don’t bet the farm yet.
Stay tuned…
[tup][tup][tup]
Darn, I was going to put the plastic tie trees in right next to the spaghetti field. I planned on selling the leaves (plastic of course) to craft stores.
The photo in the WSJ showed the plastic tie as being longer than the wood ties near it. Actually wood ties were longer around 1900 than they are now – the “standard” length has been adjusted many times over the years.
As early as the 1930 Track Maintenance Cyclopedia it was mentioned that the trees large enough to supply ties were starting to be logged out. The same point is repeated in the 1950s. Based on the lumber I buy at the lumber yard it does not look like genetically engineered tree farm trees create the kind of dense wood that good ties call for.
I have seen synthetic wood for backyard decks. To me it looks like it could get brittle in extreme cold – I know that is hard to judge by look and feel but that it my impression. And as Mudchicken mentions above, the stuff is very heavy.
But it was an interesting article.
dave nelson
not only heavy but the cost at least for the wood decking is 3x that of regular lumber.
isn’t heavier weight an advantage for ties[?]
Have to agree with you about the quality of wood at the lumber yard nowadays, but unless you’re buying wood for making cabinets or furniture, that’s softwood (Southern yellow pine, usually). Aren’t most ties oak? The pine is intensively farmed, but AFAIK no one is farming oak.
Doesn’t really matter, though, because the lack of good trees for lumber or ties can be traced to the same cause. It costs so much to own land these days that the landowner can’t afford to let slow-growing (and therefore dense- and close-grained) trees hang around taking up space and nutrients that faster-growing trees could turn into cash more quickly. I own 40+ acres of timber land and the property taxes eat me alive. If I could find anybody who was a big enough damn fool to offer me what the county says the land is worth, I’d accept the offer so fast his head would spin. No one would be willing to pay what slowly-grown wood would cost in today’s world.
Plastic ties work great on my CODE 100 HO track!
The October issue of Trains, in the article about the BNSF, has a photo inset with an interesting point about concrete and wood ties. It says that on a bridge, concrete ties tend to wear away beause the bridge deck is not flexible and a grinding action results. So even if a line is predominantly concrete ties, they use wood on bridges.
By the way in the BN/BNSF yard in Galesburg, some key ties near switches that are too important to be tied up in maintenance for very long, they use steel ties. Steel ties are common in steel plants where wood ties might burn due to heat but they are fairly rare in non industrial uses.
Dave Nelson
Go to http://online.wsj.com/article_email/0,,SB109812734542348276-IVjgYNilah3npypbXuHbK6Fm4,00.html to check out the article.
A few years ago when part of the Chicago EL was re-built, Trains Magazine ran a news article about using plastic ties made from milk jugs.
Roger38
It works great for my code 70 12mm gauge HOn3 track
Do they plan on making the ties out of the plastic that is used on the side of hockey rinks?