Hey there — I have a quick question. I have been wanting to see if there were any solutions to derailments/disconnections with kato cars on a broadway limited loco. At first I thought I was having issues with the layout/not level etc. Yet after close examination on some of the disconnect points/corners. You can see that the knuckles are at slightly different levels. To test this, I placed my Kato cars on the VRE (Kato) I have, and everything was fine. Are there any tips on connecting Kato to Broadwaylimited? — I plan on using my Kato cars as a through train and pairing it with a Norfolk loco — so, possibly the solution is to make sure that loco is Kato, but I was hoping this would not be the case. Thanks in advance.
If the couplers are at different heights, one manufacturer is at fault. Get a coupler height gauge and check their compliance. You might need to shim/raise low cars, or modify high cars to make their couplers lower.
I use Micro-Trains' N Scale Coupler Height Gauge #1055 (aka Product Code 988 00 031) for an accurate reference on coupler heights. Depending on the equipment manufacturer, it can sometimes be very difficult to adjust things.
I replaced all of the BLI couplers with McHenry couplers as I felt for operation purposes the BLI couplers were too small. They look good but I had problems with them. Fred
