Modern couplers with the “thumbtack” style armature under the drawbar are notorious for spontaneously uncoupling. The usual advice is to put a rubber band or other ligature around the drawbar to disable the uncoupling function. But this is unsatisfactory if you want to do any switching with your train.
I may have found a cure, at least for all-metal versions of this coupler design. The couplers on my MTH superliners were giving me trouble. I determined that under load there was enough friction between knuckles that the couplers did not slide against each other vertically but stayed together as a unit. Irregularities in the track were causing one coupler to move up and its mate to move down slightly on their spring-loaded pivots. If a coupler moved upward just a little, the armature and pin didn’t follow; and it opened. I filed a square notch at the base of the pin, close to the armature and wide enough to catch on the edge of the bottom plate of the coupler head. When the coupler is loaded, the knuckle presses the pin against this plate, the notch locks the pin into place, and the armature and coupler head are forced to stay together. When I want to uncouple, that force is absent; so the coupler opens normally.
Runtime, I don’t think so. The only postwar couplers I can identify that have that kind of mechanism are the ones like those on the front trucks of F3s. But they don’t have the vertical clearance to move upward enough to have this problem. Even if they did, their pins are quite slender and probably too thin to file a notch in.
With the variety of train products and given that even though things like couplers look very similar on first glance, they all have subtle differences. Which can make latching up a train of differing makes of trains troublesome.
I’ve mentioned this one before, but when K-Kine first went to the ALL metal trucks including the coupler armature, the pin on that armature was too thick. You literally had to slam the cars to get them to couple. I’m talking around the period when the all white Lehigh Valley box car came out… that car was like as I describe. Same deal with one of the Reading single door box cars made for Boscov’s. K-Line later changed it and fixed the problem. The fix on these early all metal coupler assemblies is to take a small jewelers file, and file down the pin on the backside closest to the train car. You can actually file down quite a bit more than you might think. Experiment with it and see if it then works. Then round off the side you filed down, and the cars will couple as well as any others.
BTW, the nicest working trucks K-Line ever made were the ones for the Train-19 cars. Those are beauties! Followed up by the replacement trucks made for the K-Line Husky line of cars. Those Husky replacement trucks had the newer hidden coupler armature, but are hard to find as these were introduced at the end of K-Line’s original run. They were made in a boxed set of 6, including a long armed coupler version that would work well on a Lionel bay window caboose.
Some other fixes:
The early all plastic K-Line trucks were pretty notorious for not working well. I have found that replacing the K-Line plastic knuckle with one made by Lionel is a good fix and makes them couple better. BUT you will also need the metal rivet pin that is made by Lionel too. There is a diameter size difference between the K-Line and Lionel pins… the K-Line one is bigger. The only way you could use the K-Line pin with the Lionel knuckle is to carefully either drill the holes for the pin in the knu
Were you able to find those bands somewhere or did you go to obvisious source - orthodontist? I have used smallest rubber bands I could find but that still results in multiple winds that can be noticeable.
These are available from your friendly orthodontist - note size on package. These are installed on the Polar Express cars and work perfectly…both the old Lionel Post War uncoupler/control sections and the new K-line uncoupler section are able to uncouple them with 12-16 VAC track power.
I’ve mentioned this before gang, but if you don’t know of a friendly orthodontist, you can find very small black rubber bands, made for little girl’s hair, at dollar stores. I bought a bunch of bags some years ago that had 500 rubber bands for a buck. Not only are these great for the coupler solution mentioned by Chief, but they also make a super looking load for a gondola… very lightweight too. Can run a long train of gons loaded with those.
Doug, the best way I can walk you through what I do (since I do not have a digital camera) is to first remove a couple trucks from any IR car… the gondola or flat car are the easiest. Once they are removed, but the trucks on a table top coupled together and try swinging them as if they were going around a tight curve. You’ll see that there’s very little space for movement of the knuckle that is inside the other coupler. You can try the same thing with a loose Lionel (or any make) truck with an IR one.
Now try taking some pieces of 027 curved track and put the curves together in opposite directions so you have a couple of “S” patterns and the potential problem becomes more obvious. The real trouble for derailment with the IR cars is NOT when running forward (I have no troubles here) but when you are backing up a train through some snake-like track configurations with 027 curves. I didn’t have so many troubles with previous layouts, but my current one is way more complex with some track configurations that push the trains to the test… the IR cars don’t do as well on my new layout as they did in the past.
Granted I have broken some track layout rules: never put curve track directly off a switch track. Never put several switch tracks in a row going off the curved side.
So what I do is to use a new hardened drill bit or a very small grinding bit, and I grind down the entire inside space of the closed IR cou
You can buy a necular bomb easier than getting those. No joke. Went to several orthodontists. Their receptionists thought you asked for s-x. Actually one of my fellow Mayors got them for me from a guy who works on the orthodontist and dentist equipment. Good luck. Easiest is to find a friend who is going to or kids are going to an orthodontist.
This "reply is really a question of its own, but I thought this thread was a good place for it. What about when you Want to uncouple cars? I read about all the nice layouts with yards & industrial spurs and I would like to know what technique(s) is(are) used to breakdown a consist or to dropoff freight cars to a spur? This is almost never explained in articles or even specialty books on designing freight yards. Is it all done manually or by remote uncoupling tracks, etc? How is this done on club layouts during operating sessions? I would really appreciate an info on this.
The straightforward way is to put an uncoupling section on each yard track. Instead, I use a single uncoupler in the yard lead just upstream of the yard throat and a turnout just upstream of that. The turnout has a very short siding ending in a bumper. I uncouple between two cars of a train by opening the one of the two couplers that is farther from the yard. Then I pull the front part of the train through the turnout, then shove back through the turnout to the bumper to close the open coupler, then pull back onto the lead, then shove all the cars with couplers closed but not joined into the yard track. When I pull out of the yard, only the front section comes out, leaving the rear section on the yard track where I wanted to put it.
Lionelsoni – Thanks for the clever tip using the short siding – just the kind of thing I was looking for ! I’m surprised I have never seen it explained before in magazines, or show up in layout track diagams.
