Triang OO gauge streamliners, knuckle couplers and me.

[Anonymous]

I have a set of pennsy OO gauge streamliners i picked up at a swap meet a few years back, and im wondering if its possible to convert them from horn hook to knuckle couplers. The horn hooks are mounted in boxes that screw into the cars underbelly, instead of a tiny screw its a nut and bolt that holds it in. Im wondering what size of knuck would i need to use.

[lonewoof]

Isn't OO real close to HO, scale-wise? seems like KAdees would work. And there's a great variety of mounting styles, offsets, and knuckle sizes...

Just looked up "OO" scale on the NMRA site. It's 4.0 MM/ft, compared to HO at 3.5MM/ft; ratio 76:1 vs. 87:1 for HO. Sounds like Kadee HO couplers would be real close to scale size...

[BR60103]

If you can get at the nut and the bolt, you should be able to take off the old coupler and put on a Kadee in its box. If the hornhooks don't have any special twists to them, a #5 should work. You may need to experiment with variations of length and offset and use one of the variations.

[Anonymous]

These would be the old Triang Transcontinental cars right? They're now highly collectable if in decent condition, take a look at eBay and www.modelfair.com to get an idea of the prices they now reach.

As far as fitting Kadees is concerned, I personally wouldn't bother. These cars are massively under scale length, have very coarse wheels and no standard coupler draft gear - instead they have Triang's normal tension-lock couplings mounted on the trucks (at least, the UK versions do). I would track down some of the matching locos and operate them as a period piece rather than trying to make them compatible with modern equipment - I'm slowly working on building a set of these cars with matching locos to do just this. Should you decide you want to fit Kadees, I would suggest looking at their #508 or #505 kit as a basis - these are intended to fit Concor or other cars with truck-mounted couplers and would probably fit with a little work. Just my opinions!

[BR60103]

Matt: an outfit called American Train and Track imported a number of Tri-Ang items into the USA and managed to get hornhook couplings on them. Main item was the RDC, but it looks like they had some passenger cars as well. I'm not sure if they had better wheels.
Stuck: are the draft gear boxes for the couplings openable, or sealed shut? In other words, can you remove the coupling alone or do you have to take the whole contraption off?

[Anonymous]

QUOTE: Originally posted by BR60103

Matt: an outfit called American Train and Track imported a number of Tri-Ang items into the USA and managed to get hornhook couplings on them. Main item was the RDC, but it looks like they had some passenger cars as well. I'm not sure if they had better wheels.

Now you mention it, I remember reading something about these recently - think they also offered Triang British container flats fitted with horn-hooks, at least, I've seen a photo of one fitted with these. I found one streamline car and some RDCs listed at www.modelfair.com in their pre-owned section, sadly their photos aren't quite high-resolution enough to see how the couplers are fitted or what sort of wheels they have. I'd guess they came up with something that fitted to the standard Triang coupler mounting (probably riveted on, at least, that's how Triang fitted most of their couplers) and produced a horn-hook at the correct height.

I have one of their earlier dome cars painted silver with red stripe which I picked up at a show a few years ago - it was cheap and in decent condition, still looking for the other cars and matching locos though. The wheels on this are something like those found on a heavy roller, though I suspect they might have fitted something better to the export models - was RP25 around back then?