I was just today working with some Sergent couplers. And I had to shove them into alignment. More than once.
Maybe you should dump the Kadees and get Segents????
Ed
Please do. I thought PRR yardmasters got along with everybody.
Charlie
Charlie,Interesting story..
I might PM you some day and tell you of bad blood between PRR yard engineer and a yardmaster..It features a hot summer day and a FM10-44..
Larry
Conductor.
Summerset Ry.
"Stay Alert, Don't get hurt Safety First!"
My thought is why would you want to? I guess it depends on your attitude toward it. Lord knows I had to walk a lot in real life to make joints in cuts when the pin didn't drop or the knuckles were closed. I still have to walk down to the other end of my basement now and then to persuade a coupler to behave as it should. Must be deferred maintainence taking it's toll on my fleet of too many cars.
Thinking back to the late sixties, we had to switch out the inbound TOFC train to seperate the Flexi-vans from the pigs that were turned right, turned wrong, or going overhead to connections instead of via rubber. Those cars all had long heavy drawbars and I had a conductor who would always give a stop signal and let the cars go in the middle of a crossover when switching whenever he could. That would assure the drawbars would be off center and I would have to go down the tracks and wrestle those heavy beggars back into alignment.
It was a matter of bad blood between us because he dislked me for breaking his brother's ribs. His brother was an engineer and was too lazy to lean out the cab window to see a hand signal. I got so tired of having to step back away from the cut so he could see me, I ran him into some cars pretty hard and knocked him off the seat box. After that he leaned out the window but he and his brother, the conductor, made life miserable for me when they could.
Even with the centering springs, Kadees aren't 100 percent reliable. It's not that uncommon that I have to nudge one a little to get it to line up with another coupler so they can couple successfully.
I stop before a coupling to allow my brakeman to check the couplers for alignment and to ensure one of the knuckles is open.After the coupling I allow time for him to release the handbrake..
It might be alright if we had some LPBs to push or kick them into alignment like the real ones, but one of the features of the early Kadees which was an improvement over most others of that time was the self-centering feature. I suppose if all of your track is readily within reach, it might slow things down a bit, but you could accomplish that simply by allowing time for the imaginary brakeman to walk to the car being picked-up, possibly re-align the couplers and then connect the air and walk back to the loco.Sergent couplers don't have the self-centering feature and also require the operator to uncouple things, too, using a magnetic wand.
Wayne
I was recently installing some Kadee no. 5 couplers and remembered a prototype practice I had to do to couple up cars. Often times the couplers wouldn't line up right. As a conductor I had to stop the train a few feet before the next car and line up the couplers. It seems to me that this could be replicated on a model railroad by omitting the centering spring that is included with some Kadee couplers. Has anyone tried this? It sure would slow things down a bit if you had to manually line up the couplers. Your thoughts?