not yet rich, but I'm thinking of ONLY doing the lead truck, per a suggestion on yahoo n-scale board. i discussed the first coupler issue with someone from Kato at the NTS in Cincy. His suggestion was to use a long shank coupler (from a newer kato loco I guess) IN the first truck. I used the longer shank coupler on the rear of a sd70mac to pull my kato coal gons, still had problems on corners with uncoupling (282mm curves AND 315mm curves) once you get the lead truck thru the curve, the rest run extremely well, and appearance wise, the 100 ton truck mounted near the end of the sill looks MUCH better than any other modern coal gon (IMHO), including DI and LBF in addition, I'm a HUGE fan of metal wheelsets, for which there are MANY reasons to use vs plastic wheelsets. Just my opinion! I'll try to post a reply later this week (got me some vacation time to play with the trains!) with the results of my experiments Ed Dillard
