Railway wooden fences

[Harry Bloomfield]

Just visiting the NYM Railways and I wondered why their wooden fences, in common with all older railway property - have the normally vertical timber of fences at an angle?

 

[foxhole]

Harder to climb?

 

[conny]

By 'at an angle' which way is the angle? I.E. leaning right/left or forward/backward towards platform/pavement?

 

[Harry Bloomfield]

By 'at an angle' which way is the angle? I.E. leaning right/left or forward/backward towards platform/pavement?

Left / right, maybe 35 degrees from being vertical.

 

[conny]

Shot in the dar; To allow rain water to drop off the underside/run down the upper side more effectively?
.Or maybe because they found it more aesthetically pleasing to the eye?

In short, I don't really know and Google hasn't helped.

 

[^woody^]

It may well be just a design intent to harmonise all station or railway ownership. But it does give a more "pointy" top to the fence, without needing to cut the pales.

 

[mattylad]

Got a photo Harry to explain what your on about?

 

[bernardgreen]

 

[conny]

Seeing that convinces me it is a deliberate design to be pleasing on the eye.

 

[Harry Bloomfield]

Seeing that convinces me it is a deliberate design to be pleasing on the eye.

Our tiny local 1840's station fence has the same style of fence.

 

[bernardgreen]

From the depths of my memory I seem to recall that inclined pales were ( are) used on fixed fencing and vertical pales were ( are ) used on gates.

 

[^woody^]

Another thing that comes to mind is that by angling the pales you can have a fence at different heights without needing to cut the pales - so perhaps where a 6' fence may be too high as in that photo.

 

[Deleted member 174758]

One of the guys we had with us last year had worked on railway maintenancefor Network Rail - so I rang him up and asked him. He told me that square crosscutting the pales to length (in the workshop) is faster (= cheaper) than making two cuts to get a point, that the pales being angled means that the connection to the rails make to the fence is more wind, weather and vandal resistant and that the pales always arrive on site pressure treated and cut to length in packs, so cutting them would leave a rot access as well as the noise of sawing annoying the bejaysus out of local residents (bearing in mind that most repairs on the railway are carried out between 10pm and 6am).

Of course that might just be BS...

 

[Harry Bloomfield]

One of the guys we had with us last year had worked on railway maintenancefor Network Rail - so I rang him up and asked him. He told me that square crosscutting the pales to length (in the workshop) is faster (= cheaper) than making two cuts to get a point, that the pales being angled means that the connection to the rails make to the fence is more wind, weather and vandal resistant and that the pales always arrive on site pressure treated and cut to length in packs, so cutting them would leave a rot access as well as the noise of sawing annoying the bejaysus out of local residents (bearing in mind that most repairs on the railway are carried out between 10pm and 6am).

Of course that might just be BS...

That sounds like the probably answer.

 

[RandomGrinch]

The slanted fencing was the Midland Railway house style (later incorporated into the LMS) and only used in prominent places such as stations. The boards were usually cut from cleaned up recovered sleepers.
I'm afraid I can't tell you why the LMS used this style, but it was a big part of the visual identity that differentiated them from the other members of the 'Big Four' (GWR had a pretty standard straight wooden picket fence, whereas SR were pioneers in precast concrete fencing).