"Leon" wrote in message
...
That probably depends on where you live, in Houston you can often find
RR ties at lumber yards.
Yes, they are pretty much clean to handle with a trace of creosote. They
still last for decades as landscape timbers.

The summer of 1969 I got summer work as a laborer at Southern Pacific's
creosote plant located on the west end of Houston's Englewood Yard,
practically under Lockwood Drive just north of I-10.
Hottest damn summer I can remember often topping 100 degs. Laborer often
meant stickering green ties for air drying, essentially building "towers" of
stickered, cross-stacked ties that involved a fork lift as well as a couple
of us laborers atop the growing stack to position and space those ties with
three-foot long hand hooks.
You sweated constantly which meant you likely were wiping your face with
the back of your gloved hand which meant you couldn't avoid imparting some
of those chemicals on and around your face. My face soon began peeling in
various places and continued to do so all that summer.
And, we handled treated bridge and switch ties using the hand hooks to
drag those along runners then bundling them [usually two over two] and
banding them for shipping readiness.
That facility is long gone now. When I left the railroad in 1994 most
of Southern Pacific's treated ties came from the Kerr McGee plant in
Texarkana. I still haven't figured out why the U.S. rail industry has never
began converting to concrete ties as has most of Europe.

Dave in SoTex