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[quote user="Modelcar"] ....Anyone else out there care to give a discription of how force is carried through one railroad coupler to the connecting mate.....I've checked photos in Google, etc....but still don't see the path the force is carried through the assembly.  [/quote]That is an interesting question.  I have certainly opened and closed a lot of couplers, but I could not draw an accurate picture from memory of what goes on between the knuckle and the coupler pin.  I do know that the whole coupler disassembles like a puzzle.  Like most mechanical devices that have been used and perfected over a long period of time, the automatic railroad coupler strikes me as a truly elegant work of art.  It ranks right up there with the freight car truck.I always admired the way you could pull the pin and it would hold that released state on its own, as well as the way you could open the knuckle by pulling the pin if you pull it fast and hard.  And I always wondered why some pins, especially the top-pull pins, would sometimes fail to hold the pulled state on their own.  Was it a matter of internal wear?Someone pointed out above, that the knuckle pin merely serves to hold the knuckle in place when it is open and disengaged from the coupler pin, as well as the convincing hazard of pulling the coupler pin when the knuckle pin is missing, grabbing the knuckle to open it, and having it fall on your toe.  I had never thought about this issue of the knuckle pin's function before.  I guess I always assumed that it was part of the load carrying mechanism.  Is it true that a pair of mated couplers with the coupler pins locked, could transmit the pulling load with their knuckle pins missing?  I could see this being possible, if the coupler pins locked in such a way as to prevent the knuckle from pulling lengthwise as well as from rotating in its open/close path.  However, it would seem that if this is the case, the knuckle pin needs to have a sloppy enough fit to prevent it from sharing any of the load with the coupler pin.Surly there must be a clearly drawn diagram of the parts and functions of the automatic coupler that someone could find and post.  I don't recall seeing this matter thoroughly explained and illustrated in any of several hundred railroad publications, however.
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