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Do Railroad Managers Secretly Favor PTC?

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[quote user="schlimm"]The Janney coupler was available starting after 1873, but the rails had no program to adopt. until the mandate of the SAA of 1893.  there was a seven year grace period to implement, which the rails did by 1900. Nothing complicated about this piece of history.[/quote] I am reading about this in The American Railroad Freight Car by John H. White, Jr.  He devotes 28 large format pages to the evolution from link and pin couplers to Janney couplers.  I do see the mandate of 1893 and the 7 years to fully implement, but I do not see the Janney coupler being available in 1873.  Janney began working on his coupler design in 1865.  He received his first patent in 1868, but that one was a dead end.  He received a second patent in 1873, but this only marked the beginning of a long period of testing and refining the design.  The railroad industry was besieged with contestants in the coupler inventors’ sweepstakes, and Janney was just one of them in the crowd.  During the 1880s there were a lot of coupler test trials conducted.  In 1887, there were over 4000 coupler patents being evaluated.  It was not until 1888 that the MCB adopted the Janney coupler as the standard, calling it the MCB coupler.  Janney’s design was then placed in the public domain so it could be manufactured by many different coupler manufacturers.   By 1891, there were nineteen different companies manufacturing Janney couplers.  Even at this date, the Janney coupler was far from perfected.  Mr. White says, “It proved to be a weak link and was very prone to failure.”   In 1891 the Burlington reported 540 broken couplers plus 2,400 failed knuckles.  At this time, other than the coupler mating elements, all of the rest of the mechanism varied from one manufacturer to the next.  This included the unlocking mechanism which required trainmen to learn all of the operational differences, and to get between cars at night to study the couplers in order to learn how to unlock them.  This lack of standardization also required railroads to inventory parts for all the various non-standardized mechanisms. It was not until 1893 that steel replaced malleable iron, thus making the couplers strong enough to stand up in service.  Oddly enough there was some counterforce to the adoption of the MCB coupler coming from those who were safety advocates expected to endorse it.  Some preferred some of the earlier couplers that were developed as safer link and pin couplers.  There was a belief the radically new couplers introduced hazards.  This fear was somewhat confirmed by the fact that coupler accidents peaked in 1893 with roughly 20% of the car fleet converted.  This rise in accidents was attributed to the safety compromise involved with coupling MCB couplers with link and pin couplers, which was accomplished by a slotted knuckle on the MCB coupler to receive the end of a link to be pinned to the knuckle. So, overall, I conclude that the mandate of 1893 roughly coincided with the availability of the practically perfected MCB coupler.  And it was not available at all before 1888.
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