Various respondents have noted that transverse wooden sleepers were used on  
most if not all of the early horse-drawn waggonways, meaning that they were in 
 use from early in the C17.  During the Napoleonic Wars period the price of 
timber in  Britain rocketed, while  simultaneously, the price of iron halved, 
and these two market  price changes encouraged the replacement of wood on  
waggonways, by iron and  stone, i.e. iron for  rails and stone for ‘sleepers’.  
 
From about 1800, most new  waggonways in the North East used iron rails on 
stone sleeper  blocks, e.g. the Kenton  & Coxlodge of 1808, and gradually, the 
older waggonways adopted the same  technique, e.g. the  Willington waggonway in 
1819.  Moreover, these were the materials used for track on  the first 
steam-hauled mixed-freight railways, the Stockton & Darlington Railway and the  
Liverpool & Manchester Railway, for example. 

 
The Durham  & Sunderland Railway, which opened in 1836, was laid with 
cast-iron, fish-bellied rails, (but with some  wrought-iron rails on embankments), 
set upon  large-log sleepers of 7 inch diameter, and  this railway was probably 
the first new line of the  C19, not to employ stone sleeper blocks, although  
many  other earlier lines were, by this time, beginning to convert back  from 
stone blocks to wooden transverse sleepers.  But, for reasons which may always 
remain  unclear, some north-east waggonways continued with simple wooden  
rails, for example, on the Garesfield waggonway until the 1840s, and it seems  
likely that others never gave up their transverse wooden sleepers.   
This means, in short, that you could  find transverse wooden sleepers in use 
at any time after the early C17, in some  parts of the country. 
Hope this  helps 
Stafford