I bought a few of their couplers from their website and spent some time installing them last night. These things are really nifty. They look great and function exactly as advertised if you follow their instructions for breaking them in. My layout is a relatively small shelf layout where you are never more than 10 inches from your train. I also will never have more than 25 cars on the layout. I plan on slow protypical operation sessions so “kicking the coupler to line it up” can easily be part of the fun. For my kind of layout conversion from KD’s isn’t that much of a financial burden. - Nevin
I’ve put Sergent couplers on several pieces of rolling stock and must agree that they are more prototypical and accurately scaled than any of the Kadees or Kadee clones. After my first batch of 20 or so purchased in kit form, I have settled on the pre-assembled ones for subsequent purchases.
All depends on how many pieces of rolling stock you have unless you want to have one transition car.I had them on several steam locomotives but took them off
I have bought Quite A few kits with the narrow box they are the en87 I think anyway I got them for my Hon3 trains I figger on using them on all my narrow gauge and I think standered gauge I like them for how they work and also Look great My layout is in A room that is about 9 x 27 feet Roy
Yes Sergent Couplers are SWEET! If you haven’t seen them in action check out the demo!
Hi from Belgium,
I have see them a few weeks ago and I must agree they look great and work well.
Unfortunately I did’nt like the stick you need to uncouple them; I prefer the way the Kadee or MT couplers uncouple with a magnet or a magnetic uncoupler.
In a great area like a big yard or a little bit far spur uncoupling a train with these stick could be tricky and the big real hand over my train are far more unrealistic that the small uncoupler device.
It’s just my point of view.
So far modeling in Nscale I can’t use them but again they look great and work well for small railroad and for easily reaching track.
Marc
I don’t suppose that these are made in N scale?
Bob
Thanks for the link to the demo-- I checked it out, the sergant couplers are very nice.
However I didn’t realize how “weathered” your trains would look if you use Kadee’s. That’s a nice feature, IMO. A good reason to stick with Kadee…
Are Surgents at all usable with passenger cars with diagrams? And also, after looking at the videos I must say that Kadee still look good. And without trip pins the space between cars looks more prominent that between Kadee coupled cars. I think in real life there are bunch of hoses going between passenger cars. Next time I need to take a note when riding on Amtrak.
I experimented with them on a pair of Walthers passenger cars a while back. Using the magnetic wand, it was possible, though tricky, to uncouple them. You basically had to work the wand between the diaphragms and wiggle it around until you “caught” the ball. Not very practical to me.
Somewhere on the Sergent website was a description of a way to uncouple passenger cars, but it required modifying the cars and adding a steel rod…also not practical.
So far, the best method I could come up with is to carefully pry the diaphragms apart at the bottom to clear the couplers and lift one car to separate them. That obviously wouldn’t work with titelocks.
So, at the moment, I’d have to say that Sergents are best suited to freight cars. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, though…when a passenger train is moving, can you really see the couplers that easily? I’d rather have couplers that can be easily uncoupled than beautiful scale couplers that are difficult to uncouple.