What is a sleeper retaining wall?
One particular type of retaining wall is a sleeper retaining wall. These walls used wooden or concrete planks, usually built for use in railroad tracks (parts called sleepers since they simply lay in place and allow for trains to glide along them) to form the structure of the retaining wall.
How do you define a retaining wall?
A retaining wall is a structure designed and constructed to resist the lateral pressure of soil, when there is a desired change in ground elevation that exceeds the angle of repose of the soil. A basement wall is thus one kind of retaining wall.
What are structural sleepers?
Structural concrete sleepers are sleepers made from concrete that have been reinforced with steel. These sleepers are extremely strong and can be used in all kind of projects that require structural support.
What is a sleeper wall made of?
To minimise the need for deep joists, which could be expensive, builders used intermediate supports called sleeper walls. These small walls of stone or brick were built directly on the ground or on foundations.
How do you use a sleeper retaining wall?
Constructing a retaining wall out of upright sleepers is pretty straightforward. Simply dig a trench, lower the sleepers in vertically side by side, and then backfill with a dry concrete mix, that you can ram down around the railway sleepers untill the wall is rigid.
What are different types of retaining walls?
There are several types of retaining walls, some of the popular ones are discussed below.
- Gravity wall.
- Reinforced Retaining Wall.
- Concrete Cantilever retaining wall.
- Counter-fort / Buttressed retaining wall.
- Cantilevered wall.
- Reinforced Soil Retaining Wall.
- Soil nailed wall.
- Anchored wall.
What are the basic elements of retaining wall?
A typical retaining wall has four main components: the Stem is the vertical member holding the backfill, the Toe is the portion of the footing at the front of the wall, the Heel is the portion of the footing at the backfill side, and the Shear Key projects down under the footing.
Why are sleepers called sleepers?
The common explanation of the origin of the word is to connect it with ” sleep,” the timbers supposed to be lying at rest. The real source of the word is the Norwegian sleep, a piece of timber used for dragging things over, a roller, especially used of timbers laid in a row in making a road.
Why is it called a sleeper wall?
It is constructed in this fashion when a suspended slab is required due to bearing conditions or ground water presence. Essentially it is a wall in the way that it is constructed but a sleeper in the way that it functions.