Today concrete railway sleepers are a common sight on railways around the world, including Hong Kong, but recently I discovered that the Kowloon Canton Railway was involved in their early development.
Down the rabbit hole
Concrete sleepers are mentioned in the Institution of Civil Engineers’ obituary for Robert Baker OBE, former Chief Engineer for the Kowloon Canton Railway.
After three years’ training in the manufacture of instruments he was articled for three years to Sir Robert Elliott-Cooper, and then embarked on a varied career of railway engineering, serving in England, Greece, Malaya, and China from 1911 until his retirement in 1934. He was concerned mainly with the administration and maintenance of the Kowloon-Canton Railway in Hong Kong, filling the post of Chief Engineer from 1927 onwards, combining that post with Manager. During that time he did some pioneer work in the development of reinforced concrete sleepers.
His experiments commenced in the early 1920s, as this article from the Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser dated 26 January 1922 describes.
A Hongkong resident, Mr. R. Baker, of the Kowloon-Canton Railway, has recently patented at home his invention of a new kind of concrete railway sleeper, experiments with which have so far proved the idea to be a great success. A company called the Timeproof Ferro-Concrete Railway Sleeper Co., with its offices at Westminster, has been formed to control the Manufacturing rights.
With the establishment of the company mentioned on page 85 of the 20 January 1922 issue of ‘The Electrician’.
Timeproof Ferro-Concrete Railway Sleeper Company, Ltd. (178 965), 2, Dean’s-yard, The Sanctuary. Westminster, S.W. Registered Jan. 10. To acquire from Robert Baker the benefit of an invention for improvements in railway and tramway sleepers, and turn same to account. Nominal capital, £900 in” 750 ordinary shares of £1 each and 3 000 founders’ shares of Is. each. Directors”: R. Baker, D. Macdonald, W. Daniel, and E. A. Kite. Qualification of directors, one share. Remuneration of directors. £50 each. Chairman, £75.
And finally after a lot of digging, I finally found an in depth article on the new invention in the 5 January 1922 edition of the Hong Kong Telegraph.
Hongkong Resident’s Invention
A New Railway SleeperA Hongkong resident, Mr. R Baker, of the Kowloon-Canton Railway, has invented a new kind of concrete railway sleeper, experiments with which have so far proved the idea to be a great success. Mr. Baker went Home a short time ago to patent the invention. A number of big people in the railway world be came interested, and a Company to control the manufacturing rights was formed. It is called the Timeproof Ferro-Concrete Railway Sleeper Co., and the offices of the Company are at Westminster.
The idea of a concrete sleeper is by no means a new one, Italy had about a hundred miles of rail way line laid on concrete sleepers in 1915, but as little or nothing has been heard of the scheme for several years it is to be concluded that the idea was not a success. Mr. Baker’s sleepers, however, are different from any of the previous styles. There are some three or four hundred laid near Shatin and these have been such a success that their inventor considered the idea worth patenting.
Mr. Baker has been working on the invention for several years and has experimented with several types before selecting the one which he has now had patented. It was in Sir Henry May’s time, in fact, that he first started his experiments. It is understood, that the present Governor looks upon the invention very favourably and it is, to a great extent due to Sir Edward Stubbs that the idea in being seriously taken up.
The new sleeper is quite different in appearance to the old wooden sleepers to which we are accustomed. It is of cruciform section in the middle and fairly narrow. It gets wider at the rail seats and tapers at the ends. It is of concrete, in the centre of which are a number of steel bars. It has several advantages over the old-fashioned type of wooden sleeper and it is claimed that it has also many advantages over concrete and other sleepers with which experiments have been made in white ant countries the life of a wooden sleepers not long and another great enemy of the wooden kind is dry rot. The sleepers on the Kowloon-Canton Railway come from New South Wales. They cost about fifteen shillings each at the present time, they require a great deal of attention and their life is about twelve years.
The Baker sleepers will work out st about $10 each, but as they will not be liable to attack by white ants or dry rot it will not – be necessary to treat them with kerosene oil to preserve them, which will be a great saving, and the inventor sees no reason why is they should not last half a century or more.
One great advantage with the Baker sleeper is that it does not require so much ballast as other kinds, and one thing it will help to prevent is people walking between the metals. The old wooden sleepers are placed at such a convenient distances apart that coolies often walk between the metals, stepping from sleeper to sleeper. Many have met their death in this way, but sa the new concrete sleeper is sharp and not flat on the top, walking on them will not be possible and this undesirable practice will have to cease.
The new sleeper is receiving considerable attention in the railway world. The Great Western Railway at Home is experimenting with the new Baker sleeper’s and railways in Jamaica and Tanganyika are making inquiries.
It will probably be some time before all the Kowloon-Canton Railway is laid on these sleepers, owing to the extra cost. The British section contains some 60,000 sleepers and taking the life of the average at ten years (it might be a little more than that), that means replacing about six thousand sleepers a year. The concrete sleepers cost nearly double the wooden kind, however, and it will probably not be possible to replace all wooden sleepers with concrete ones, at present, but Mr. Baker says he hopes to be able to lay about a thousand a year.
Specimens of “ant-proof railway sleeper” were exhibited in the Hong Kong Section of the European Exporters’ Rooms at the 1922 British Empire Exhibition, but it appears that the Timeproof Ferro-Concrete Railway Sleeper Co. was not a success – the London Gazette dated 5 September 1939 advising that the company would be struck off the register and dissolved, which occurred on 8 December 1939.
So what did Baker’s concrete sleepers look like?
It was lucky that Robert Baker patented his concrete sleeper design, as that should mean detailed documentation of them should still exist – with a quick search on Google Patents bringing up a United Kingdom patent application titled ‘Improvements in railway and tramway sleepers‘ by an R Baker, dated October 1920, and an Australian one with the same and author dated March 1922.
Unfortunate both lacked the full text of the application, so I headed over to the IP Australia website, found the relevant patent application, and lo and behold – the full text!
Australian parent application 1922005839
Describing the invention as:
I, Robert Baker, c/o The Kowloon-Canton Railway, Hong Kong, China, Engineer, hereby declare this invention and the manner in which it is to be performed, to be fully described and ascertained in and by the following statement:-
This invention relates to reinforced concrete sleepers for railways or tramways.
According to this invention the reinforced concrete sleeper is of cruciform section at the centre and rectangular section at the rail seats. Recesses are made in the upper surface of the sleeper to form seats for hard wood or composition shock absorbing blocks upon which the rails are supported; the recesses are cast at an angle with the upper surface of the sleeper to correspond with the
required inclination given to the rail and at the same time allowing blocks of parallel or rectangular section to be used.Preferably the ends of the sleeper are tapered at the sides and on the upper surface, and have a step underneath either side adapted to grip the ballast and assist. in preventing lateral creep or buckling of the track.
Preferably the sleeper is provided with eight reinforcing bars, two bars being located in each web of the cruciform at the centre. Six of the bars are carried through the lower portions of the sleeper under the rail and two in the upper portion whilst two additional bars may be introduced at either end which pass through the upper portions.
Along with a diagram of the sleeper design.
Australian parent application 1922005839
So how did they fare on the Kowloon Canton Railway?
Unfortunately the Hong Kong Public Libraries digitised archive of Kowloon Canton Railway annual reports only goes back to 1946, but the Hong Kong Telegraph dated 29 June 1929 offers a short summary of that year’s KCR annual report.
5,070 reinforced concrete sleepers were made departmentally; the cost of manufacture including supervision and all charges, was very much lower than previous contract prices.
2,320 concrete sleepers, 431 wooden sleepers, and 73 crossing and bridge timbers wore required to replace worn out timbers in the track.
And the website of David M. Webb has a copy of the 1934 KCR annual report, which happened to be a pivotal point in their use of concrete railway sleepers.
The manufacture of reinforced concrete sleepers ceased on the 1st August, experience having demonstrated the unsuitability of sleepers of this type.
At the end of the year, 69.6% of the sleepers in the main line were concrete.
Permanent Way renewals were as follows:-
– 5,000 “Timeproof” concrete sleepers.
– 702 Wooden sleepers.
– 482 Bridge and Crossing timbers.
– 11 sets of crossings.
– 1 set of switches.
– 29 rails.
Rather interestingly, this decision coinciding with the departure of their inventor.
Mr. Robert Baker, Manager and Chief Engineer, left the service on the 23rd March, retiring on pension with effect from 11th August. He was awarded the O.B.E. in June in recognition of his services to Government.
But despite their apparent “unsuitability”, according to page 16 of the 1948-49 annual report the concrete sleepers were still in main line service after decades of use:
Up to 31 March 1949 there were:
19,935 concrete sleepers on the Main Line
8,565 concrete sleepers on sidings
3 ,785 concrete sleepers lying in yard (not on track)32,285 concrete sleepers against an approximate total of 35,000 manufactured between 1920 and 1934.
It is worthy of note that after an average period of 22 years, 90% of Baker’s concrete sleepers are still in existence. Unfortunately it was necessary, however, when replacing 85-lb. rails with 95-lb., to remove the concrete sleepers from the curves in the Main Line due to the wider bottom of the new rail and the insufficient spread allowed by the concrete sleepers. The concrete sleepers thus removed were re-used in other places.
This re-railing of the main line was eventually completed in February 1953, which I assume marked the end of these pioneering concrete sleepers on the Kowloon Canton Railway.
Footnote: concrete sleepers strike back
As part of the modernisation of the Kowloon Canton Railway through the 1970s, the line was relaid in even heavier rail – UIC54 profile at 54 kg/m, or 109-lb. in the old measures – laid on modern precast concrete sleepers.
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