1.) Why did European locomotives not have headlights? Did they lack them since they were unnecessary due to fenced in Right-of-Ways?
2.) Why do the European railways continue to use the hook and chain coupling system even though it seems antiquated compared to the North American Janney Automatic? In a similar vein, why did Austrailia and India gradually make the change along with New Zealand?
3.) To spin question 2 on its head, why didn't North American railroads use the hook and chain system and develop the link and pin system before switching to the Janney Automatic in use today?
Thank you for your time.
Lone Geep
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lone geep1.) Why did European locomotives not have headlights? Did they lack them since they were unnecessary due to fenced in Right-of-Ways?
Some European practice does use headlights to see the right of way. German railroads had the 'triangle' pattern of white lights that North Americans now use many years ago, precisely because it is a distinctive means of identifying 'train' when seen; we just use many more lumens to get the point across.
You are fundamentally correct about the fenced-in ROW, with an added consideration that some British roads prided themselves on local road knowledge to the extent they didn't think 'keeping a safe lookout' with bright headlights was all that important. I remember as a boy reading about heavy fog days with London expresses thundering by several minutes apart, with visibility little more than 15 feet, and wondering how they safely did it. Answer: they presumed they were a great deal safer than they actually were, but 'adherence to regulations'[ eliminated most of the usual sort of risk North American operation might face under similar conditions...
2.) Why do the European railways continue to use the hook and chain coupling system even though it seems antiquated compared to the North American Janney Automatic? In a similar vein, why did Australia and India gradually make the change along with New Zealand...
There are a couple of parts to this. The first is that the 'buffer' system got around most of the problems with screw couplings, and that was arrogantly thought superior to the American 'link and pin' with thousands and thousands of cheap little links and pins and the need for patent link-flipping tools that 'real switchmen' didn't need or use. The second is that, in many cases, when the European need for better or automatic couplings came in, they had "better" alternatives than Janney (for example, first Scharfenberg and then UIC. When I was a boy of about 7, it was published in Trains Magazine that European railways were going to standardize on the UIC coupler, and I became a little jealous at how much better their couplers were going to be than ours. (Didn't happen, though!)
In this country there has not yet been an 'integrated' system that was cost-effective and robust enough to be used for freight service, although there have been 'patent' systems with things like integrated air-brake connections since... well, since the time of the adoption of the general Janney coupler idea as a MCB standard.
Elsewhere in the world, I think specifically including Russia, where a good robust automatic coupler was needed, it was hard to beat a Janney with easily replaceable hardened knuckles and simple pin action.
It's real simple: COST. In order for the buffer system to work, every car has to have expensive buffers, kept in good order, and the couplings have to be kept lubricated and ungalled. The link-and-pin system has comparatively simple drawheads, with both the links and pins made very, very cheaply as throwaway items. It was sorta assumed that the drawhead faces would provide enough buff to hold the car ends apart while joints were made ... this was certainly not the case often enough to maim a large number of switchmen in horrible ways.
Economics became a major driver of the switch to Janney, remembering that the 'intermediate' step was to slot the knuckle and provide a vertical pin hole through it to allow link-and-pin compatibility. It is impractical to run hump yards or even the usual sort of class yards with "Lincoln pins" and some of the safety devices like the Miller anticlimber require a strong connection between cars to work right. Hand-in-hand with airbrakes came the value of reliable outside cut-lever release. And there was no perceived value to ... or market for ... large numbers of cheap iron links scaled up to the larger loads and higher speeds railroading was reaching in North America by the 1890s.
BTW the 'screw-link' system inherently requires spring buffers to work -- otherwise it does much the same thing as the chains on the original DeWitt Clinton's train, a dreadful congeries of slack action beyond belief. Laugh if you must at links and pins; they had minimal slack action and could tolerate reasonable (for the time) central buff-and-draft drawgear and center sills.
There's more involved, but that will get you started.
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