Hi! I just bought a few Branchline Blueprint freight car kits. Inside their boxes I found horn hook couplers, instead for knuckle coupkers I think they should have. Does anyone know if these kits came with horn hook couplers some time in the past? Or they are surely replaced? Thanks for your help. Kiriakos
Hello Kiriakos, nice to meet you. I would like to add my questions on this subj. if that's ok. I would like to know which couplers are better. Are there more than 2 types and is one used more for certain tasks? Thanks.
Knuckle and horn-hook are the two main types in North America. European models have other weird types. I've never heard of horn-hooks being able to do anything that knuckle couplers can't.
Thank you! I know some about couplers. My question is if the Blueprint freight kits come (or came in the past) with horn hook couplers or I've been fooled by the seller. Kiriakos
Here's their website: Branchline Trains You may be able to find out more there, hopefully. Good luck.
I've already chequed their site but this couldn't help. In e-bay i found that these kites come with e-z mate knuckle couplers now, but i want to know if older kits had horn hook couplers. Anyway thanks! Kiriakos
The older kits as far as I know (along with all the other coupler included kits) came with horn hook couplers before the advent of the plastic knuckle coupler. Your best bet is to discard them and go with Kadees, which as far as I know were not included either way.
Kiriakos - As far as I know all plastic kits came with horn-hooks up until ~4 - 5 years ago. I have several of the "Blue Print" kits bought About a year or so ago, and they had horn hooks. Probably older stock. I think I have just about every brand of knuckle coupler made; Kadee, Accu-Mate and McHenry - both standard and scale and they all seem to work together just fine.
Thank you all! Dave Jones thank you! You told me exactly what I wanted to learn. Also for the tip about the different knuckle coupers. I'm just beggining to collect american freight cars. Joseph I'm not the expert on this, but as other stated and as I see in magazines everybody uses knuckle couplers. I thing they are more realistic also. I'm going to replace with knuckles in the kits I'm going to make. Kiriakos [ March 05, 2006, 09:12 AM: Message edited by: Kiriakos ]
Should you convert to knuckle couplers, I suggest Kadee as the brand to go to- they're metal, and have been proven to last longer than the plastic ones McHenry, AccuMAte, and their ilk make. Of course, if you're running short trains, you may get by OK with plastic couplers, but for long trains and/or long service life, I suggest Kadees.
Also take care when buying older kits and RTR cars that are "Mantua" Brand. Make certain you insulate the metal K-D couplers from the metal Mantua car frame, or it will short out.
Friscobob Thanks for the suggestion, I've already download the PDFs of the installation instructions (I'm novice on this) from Kadee's site. Watash Thanks for the advise, will be useful in future. At present all the kits I have are plastic, even some (older?) from Roundhouse. My only problem is that I have to order everything from abroad because nobody sells American trains models in Greece. The only exception is European firm's models (Trix, Roco in the past) and some LL Protos that Brawa sells under it's name in Europe. Kiriakos
