And I find it strange that reporters “down under” use the term “carriage” for what we call (in the US) a passenger car.
http://www.geelongadvertiser.com.au/article/2007/03/07/1924_news.html
The first answer given in this thread was wrong, although it wasn’t from a “working rail” as far as I can tell. It’s interesting that the other two “working rails” that have made constructive contributions to this thread both confirm my original statement.
Cheers,
Mark.
I find it strange you’d consider a journalist - particularly one quoting a government bureaucrat - a reliable source of information about anything, let alone what working railwaymen call their equipment.
So you reckon you’re terminology was correct because you got it from working railroaders, but mine isn’t, because it doesn’t agree with what a hack reporter from Geelong wrote?
LOL!
Should I conclude that there is a sort of two-part action to the releasing of the knuckle? If the releasing lever is lifted only so far, the power could pull away and the knuckle should open. If I were to pull the lever even further, the secondary action should actually encourage the knuckle to open if there is nothing to prevent its swing…is that right? So there is a cam, of sorts, that forces the knuckle to open?
No, I find it strange that people from Australia, be they “government bureaucrat” or “hack reporter,” use the term “carriage” when you had no idea what it meant.
I was being facetious - I know what a carriage is. You wrote: “We couple and uncouple cars, not carriges.” I was having a gentle dig at your inability to spell “carriage”, and to the irrelevance of your comment.
My point still stands. Railwaymen are the authoritative source for railway terminology, not journos or apparatchiks. You said so yourself.
Cheers,
Mark.
And I was making a point of the differences in terminology and especially slang between the countries. “Pulling the pin” is a common term in the US for uncoupling cars. Whether there is a pin being pulled any more or not has nothing to do with the slang that has been around since the beginning of the railroads here.
Tom, refer back to the original question, which was “How are those levers used on 1:1 models. How do they work?”, not “What is the common or slang term used in the US to describe uncoupling cars?”
The initial answer to that question, "When you raise the handle it pulls the pin that keeps the knuckle closed allowing the coupler to open."was wrong in describing how the mechanism of the coupler works, pure and simple. No amount of arguing semantics changes that.
You will have noted by now that I have never disputed the terminology used by US railroaders., But regardless, differences between US and Australian rail industry slang are irrelevant. The American-made AAR type E couplers I use on my railway work in exactly the same way, and have exactly the same components, as the American-made AAR type E couplers you use/used on your railroad. So what exactly is it that you’re arguing?
Since your memory seems to be a bit short, here’s the entry that started this part of the discussion, from page 1 post 3. It was in reference to post 2. Note the user name.
So what are you disputing? That these parts exist, or what they are called?
Back to the topic at hand…
The motion is one and the same. There’s only one way pull on the lever - all the way up.
The slack must be in, to be able lift the cut lever and raise the lock. If there is tension on the knuckles, the lock won’t release.
There is usually enough play in the knuckles for the knuckle thrower to move the knuckle slightly. If you look down at the coupled knuckles while you “pull the pin” you can acutally see the knuckle jiggle, as the thrower tries to open the knuckle. When there is nothing coupled to the car, the motion is more pronounced.
Nick
Thank-you, Nick.
YOU are the one disputing the fact that it’s called “pulling the pin” here in the US. So the part that you “pull” when you pull the uncoupler lever is the “pin.”
No, Tom, you’re wrong, I dispute no such thing. But until you learn to read for comprehension there’s no point continuing.
Perhaps this page at the Pacific Southwest Railway Museum will help explain the point about the ‘pin’…referred to there as “the locking pin”:
http://www.sdrm.org/faqs/couplers/
Be sure and check out the video demonstration too!! [C):-)]
Very helpful - a simplified explanation for a non-technical audience. The part referred to as a “locking pin” is the lock lifter.
You’re right, there is nothing to dispute, your original statement says it all:
…which looks a great deal like the “pin” from a link-and-pin coupler, which is why it’s been called “the pin” for 100 years or so by US railroaders (but maybe not by Aussie “railwaymen”??[:D])
Bottom line is, if you took fifty US railroaders and asked them to show you a car’s lock lifters, you might get one guy who could point it out and 49 blank stares. Ask them to show you the pin and they’d all know it’s the part that opens the coupler when they lift the cut lever.
Railroaders are more than just those in train service. Which department are your 50 railroaders drawn from? Operating or mechanical? I started out 30 years ago in engineering, moved to mechanical, moved to operating, was moved to signal, and now I’ve been moved into network planning and capacity design. There’s slang and there’s proper terminology. Mark Newton quotes the manual, that’s good enough for me.
S. Hadid
Here’s the full patent with some nice cross sectional diagrams of the internal mechanism of the coupler. The lock doesn’t look like a pin to me!
Tom - Mark isn’t disputing the venacular form used by railroaders. He’s disputing what the part is actually called. The patent is by the inventor, so I’d say that is pretty authoritative.