Kadee coupler.

Some years ago, whilst attending the Newark Toy and Train Fair, I found a stall selling pre-used USA outline rolling stock at really good prices. In addition to the price being attractive, the wagons were also fitted with Kadee couplers which on their own are about £5 a pair  to buy. The wagons worked out at just under £5 each so I came away with several! The only thing about them was that the previous owner had obviously fitted them as an after market modification and rather than using the proper Kadee mounting box a paper envelope had been created. The problem with this is that the coupling itself pulls out with any load on it. You cannot glue it or it will not uncouple. Having bought some of the proper mountings at the Bingham Model railway Show I decided to investigate how they fitted. I decided to trial with this caboose.

A close up reveals the coupler in the paper envalope.

With the coupler out you can see that it has a metal 'whisker' either side of the main shaft and this allows the coupler knuckle to move when it passes over a magnet in the track. This then allows the coupling to automatically uncouple from the other wagon fitted with the same style of coupling. You can also see the paper envalope mounting.

The Kadee mounting boxes come in two parts and have an inbuilt piviot for the coupling shaft.

Under the paper envelope was a piece of card that it was glued to. That needed to come off!

With some scrapping it was off revealing a solid plastic base which would form a much better mounting surrface for the coupling.

However I did need to add some plastic strip so that the coupling mounting box was at the right height from the rail.

With that done, the coupling itself was put in one half of the proper mounting box and the other half was carefully glued to it.

Then it was glued onto the caboose.

I have tried it on the layout and it does work so I just need to do the other end and then the 15 or so other wagons! If only I had more time!

Coupling Up!

The other day I had a session just playing trains on my Last Great Project Layout. That involved watching the trains run around the layout - very therapeutic and relaxing! I also had a play with my USA switching layout. This layout is very much about shunting wagons about. The importance of couplers between the wagons and locomotive is always a matter that raises lots of chat and debate between railway modelers. UK outline stock is usually offered with a variant of a coupler which goes back to the 1950s or possibly earlier. It is termed as the tension lock coupler and to put it mildly it is ugly and out of scale. It couples reliably but uncoupling is another issue. There are uncoupling ramps available and some electrical ramp systems but they all have issues. The photo below shows a really nicely detailed class 33 locomotive but with that tension lock coupling on the front it looks somewhat strange and not what you see on the real thing. As modelers, most of us just accept it and I guess we turn a mental blind eye to it.

Meanwhile our American modeling friends have enjoyed the delights of a coupler that actually looks like a real life coupler. It couples reliably and equally it uncouples reliably with the use of a magnet which can either be installed out of sight under the track or incorporated as a crossing point. This photo of one of my USA locomotives shows how much more realistic it looks with what is known as a Kadee coupler.

The Kadee coupler has a metal pin hanging under it that is repelled by a magnet - that is it moves away from the magnet. The two photos below show the pin being repelled on the loco as it crosses the magnet which is part of the level crossing on my layout.

If you can imagine the same action happening on an attached wagon's coupling which will move in the opposite direction then you can see in the photos below how the locomotive and wagon uncouple.

The further beauty of the Kadee coupler is that once uncoupled you can push the wagon to where you want to park it on the layout - wonderful!

Why don't UK suppliers put this coupling on UK models? Well there are all sorts of answers but I guess we have just had the tension lock coupling for so long that it is unlikely, because of compatibility between existing and new models, that modelers would take to a new coupling with all the costs of converting old models to couple up with new models. Meanwhile I will enjoy the coupling up delights of the Kadee on my USA Switching layout.