As some of you may recall from my previous postings, I’ve spent the last year building a new 11x15 two level HO layout. In the last couple days, I finished the DCC wiring of the main level outer main, which is essentially a large loop. My construction method is to lay a portion of track, wire it, and test it thoroughly before moving on to more track.
Soooo, I brought out some of the 150 cars and made up a 16 car train (along with a BLI 2-10-2 and RSD-15) to test the new trackage. Note that these 150 cars (I’ve got about 300 more) all have knuckle couplers and Intermountain wheelsets and have been checked out a couple of years ago.
Well, I soon found that some of the cars would just not stay coupled - or be very difficult to couple in the first place. Each of these cars had “non-Kadee” couplers! Now I’ve been a KD advocate for decades, but several kits (and a few ready to run) cars I’ve bought in the last 8 years come with “other” couplers. I figured they would be OK, but now I just don’t think they stand the test of time.
Sooo, it looks like these cars are going to the RIP track, and I’ll open up that big pack of KD whisker couplers and replace the “rubber” ones.
Am I the “lone ranger” with this situation, or have you had similar problems???
Every time I get a new Bachmann or Athearn car (that’s mostly what’s available here) they always have couplers from ‘some other’ supplier. They get Kadee couplers just as soon as I have time to change them out. At the moment I have some tank cars that need shelf couplers. I’ll order them as soon as I have the funds.
My practice since 1960’s was to put Kadee on anything I bought. that practice continues today, and I keep an inventory of the shelf and the 5’s on hand. Each new piece of equipment is checked when purchased and it goes to the work table before entering service to remove the junk and put in Kadees.
Other than a lost knuckle spring once in a while, I don’t have failures. Oh, I also make sure they are at the right height with a gauge before turning them loose on the railroad.
We are at least beyond the absurd ritual of opening up an HO kit and the first action was immediately tossing out the horn hooks , or buying a ready to run item and first thing removing the horn hooks and throwing them away.
Not all non-Kadees are equally objectionable in my experience. At least as of now my attitude has been to give the non-Kadees a chance with the notion that if they fail they will definitely be replaced by an official Kadee product.
First up let me say that I prefer to use Kadee’s myself. However, not all the “other” brands are as bad as each other. Those that use the plastic filament knuckle spring are borderline worthless. These can fail with a car in storage as I discovered when some were left in a box that resulted in the filament getting deformed into a wide open setting. Having said that, some of the McHenry couplers that use real metal springs for the couplers are not too bad. They are not as strong as the Kadee and simply don’t do well for long heavy trains, and most certainly don’t hold up well in accident situations. But for shorter, less weight trains in certain applications they have worked well for me. In particular they have held up well in some cheap IHC passenger cars.
I just bought a pair of Walthers “platinum line” cabeese. The couplers weren’t Kadee, but they seem to fall in the “acceptable until they fail” category. But, there was still a package of horn-hooks in the box. And no matter how many times I find horn-hooks, it never fails to make me chuckle. Thanks, Walthers, for adding a smile to my day.
looks like coupler controversy is akin to the “better mousetrap” syndrome. nothing beats the old victor snap trap and a piece of cheese.
i personally find that the different makes of couplers don’t “play well together” and like others, i replace the clones with an original Kadee at the first sign of trouble. some of the odd balls work ok for a while but it is safe to say that all of them will probably get changed out eventually. i use the number 5’s with the original style metal centering spring in the draft gear box and when properly adjusted, they give dependable service and are almost bullet proof.
even then, an occasional balky one requires a little nudge to get it centered properly but that is a lot easier to do in HO scale than when i worked with the 12"=1’ ones.
Kadees may not be the best “value” as some define it and a lot of guys are happy with the clones but i see it like buying a Cadillac automobile or IBM computer. they might cost more but few people complain about them after they own one.
if i were still in the market for more rolling stock, i would gladly pay an extra buck for cars and locos that come equipped with original Kadee couplers instead of some of the junk that is on a lot of them now.
To echo many of the comments here, EVERY car and loco on my layout has genuine Kadee couplers.
AND, I personally use only the orginal standard head couplers, no semi scale versions for me. Using NMRA standard track and wheel sets results in an amount of possable side play that requires the larger couplers for reliable coupling. The smaller “gathering range” of the semi scale couplers and NMRA track standards does not provide reliable enough coupling in my opinion.
All the “clones” suffer from one or all of several faults. Most are larger and looser than the Kadee, creating too much train slack action and larger distances between coupled cars. The ones with plastic knuckle springs are famous for loosing their “spring” and none are up to the weight of even 50 car trains for extended periods of time.
In addition to only using Kadee couplers, most of my rolling stock has Kadee sprung metal freight trucks outfitted with Intermountain wheel sets. After much testing this was found to be the freeest rolling and best tracking truck to be had.
Again, I don’t pull couplers off of RTR cars. Too likely to break something.
I measure with a coupler height guage and adjust where needed. I also test wheels for rolling and roundness, trucks for proper flex.
So far I’ve not encountered issues with the Clone couplers once they’ve been tested.
I have replaced couplers that fail testing for one reason or another. I used regular McHenry’s until I ran out, then scale McHenry’s and now scale whisker Kadee’s ( Those are what my LHS had in stock. ), they all seem to work just fine together.
Over on the Atlas forums they are talking up Segents, which are nice but don’t interoperate with Kadee’s or Clones.
How long are your trains? With short trains the clones seem to work OK. Those of us running 35 car, 50 car or even longer trains generally find them to be a problem.
Every car I build or buy goes through the “new car” routine, weight cars to nmra specs, replace all couplers with kadee’s or the walthers proto max metal couplers (those are just as great btw) gauge the wheels/coupler height and change out cars that have those real roller bearings or plastic wheel with intermountian for the sole purpose of being able to put a small stamp resistor on one axle for detection.
I have found that the “other” couplers that are made from plastic dont hold up very well to properly weighted trains, either a coupler would snap pulling up a grade or a operator would do a high speed ram and the knuckle would actually bend back over the side.
I have only one exception to my own “Kadees or don’t run” rule, I have used the extended McHenry couplers on some IHC/Rivarossi passenger cars. I have a N&W Powhatan Arrow set that gets run once in a while as an excursion train, and the knuckle couplers let me run it with Athearn Heavyweights. The McHenrys are a pop-in replacement, so I don’t need to try and body mount the couplers. Yeah, I’m lazy that way [:-^].
I freely admit that I might look at things differently if I ran, what for me would be, monster trains of 50 cars and had the track grades that some folks have.
On the other hand, I have run trains that size and larger on my friend’s old layout back in the 1970’s. We also managed to snap more than one Kadee knuckle or shank - thanks to less than stellar trackwork. It’d make my friend quite angry when that happened.
I have noticed that the Proto Max couplers sometimes have a small burr on the coupler face that prevents them from coupling at extremely slow speeds. I had to couple them at a faster speed and the car would roll significantly which didn’t look very prototypical. That is why everything I own has KDs or is going to get them in the near future.
I used to put McHenrys on all freight cars. While being between layouts some of the cars were stored on their side for about a year. This caused the little plastic whisker to weaken. So when the cars were put back in service they would not couple, even worse while going down an incline with the train pushing on such a coupler it would uncouple once there was no more pushing action from the cars behind. Kadees were never an issue for this and if then just replace the little spring and everything is good.
Plastic couplers also do not like long freights on my helix with 2.2% incline. Trust me pull apart situations can get really nasty really quickly.
True. The one problem I’ve had with Sergents is the coupler wand likes loose metal handrails. I had a CIRROPS guy tell me that Sergents were no better than McHenry, I find it to be apples/oranges. But I do think they are a tad bit stronger, using gravity versus a horizontal spring, there’s less give in th eknuckle itself