Currently, the most popular are wooden sleepers. The smallest spread in practice have reinforced concrete and steel sleepers. However, production of concrete sleepers is steadily growing. Wooden Sleepers are made mostly of conifers such as pine, fir, larch. In the production of wooden sleepers in the first place, it should set an appointment sleepers, because there are three main Purpose: main tracks mostly for the 1 st and 2 nd grades, for the main ways the 3rd and 4 th classes for ways to grade 5. Secondly, choose a cross-sectional shape, which is also divided into three categories: lumber, half-edged, edging. The main advantages of using wooden sleepers combines ease of handling, relatively low prices, low sensitivity to temperature fluctuations.
The main disadvantage is this kind of ties include the use of wood as raw material for the production of a category do not fully renewable resources, the rot in the ground fastening sleepers with the rails, rapid wear. In connection with the highlighted shortcomings of wooden sleepers, there is now a process of replacing this type of reinforced concrete sleepers, despite the trend increase in the cost of metal and cement. Reinforced concrete sleepers have the form reinforced concrete beams with variable cross section. Production of concrete sleepers made with advanced tension reinforcement. In practice, there are the following way tension reinforcement: 1) the mechanical method carried out using hydraulic or screw jacks, and 2) electrothermal method is used to lengthen the valve to the desired value by means of electric current used for heating valves; 3) electrothermomechanical way.
This way of stressing the steel combines mechanical and electrothermal method. The main advantage of concrete sleepers as compared with wooden sleepers is high degree of durability and long life. The disadvantages of concrete sleepers is the high cost of raw materials used for production, toughness, leading to a high degree of wear, rail wear and tires wheelsets. To address the shortcomings, and in particular to compensate for the stiffness in the production of this type of sleepers using resilient pads between the sleepers and rails. However, the production technology concrete sleepers leads to a significant increase in the cost of the path. Metal sleepers in practice are rarely used, because there is a lot of noise when moving trains, electrical conductivity, which excludes the possibility of their placement on the lines of the difficulty of compacting ballast under the sleepers. However, despite some difficulties arising in the operation of metal ties, they have significant advantages, namely, long service life compared with other types of sleepers, easily recyclable, economical, because after processing retain up to 40% of its value, the ability to use almost all over the world in connection with that can withstand high temperatures. Also among the advantages of metal sleepers need to distinguish the presence of a small number of fasteners and light weight. Among the shortcomings of the most significant is lack of electrical insulation track circuits. But this lack of ties eliminated by the use of different insulating gaskets.