I received a email the other day about a new Con Cor N Scale coupler that will be coming out soon. It is supposed to be compatible with MT couplers. What are your thoughts on this new product?? Picture below is New Con-Cor Rigid Jaw Coupler (Left), Micro-Trains (Right) I think this might spur some competition :tb-wink: Should be interesting
WOW, Con-Cor?!?! So now Bachmann, Walthers and now Con-Cor are ditching cRapidos for good in The Year 2010. Like the fall of the Berlin Wall, you are witnessing a revolution, folks.
My first thought is of the death of the Rapido. Con-Cor, Model Power and Bachmann finally came aboard the knuckle train over the past two years. With companies starting to body mount couplers, we may finally see some real improvements in tracking and coupling. My seccond thought is that while these couplers are fake, IM's dumby couplers were a really great product. They were the first high quality 100T trucks with knuckle couplers and the price was right. If Con-Cor can capture that magic, it may have a niche role in the market. The drawings listed on their website show that Con-Cor is finally upgrading their trucks. Now this is much more important to me. We may get a new inexpensive, highly detailed 70t toller bearing truck with metal wheels AND short coupler boxes. Throw in McHenry or Accumate couplers in the box and you can have a really nice truck for half the cost of MTL or Accumate trucks. So while these may not be as explosive an anouncment like BLMA's awsome trucks, or Accumates when they were anounced in 2000, these may find a useful role in N scale. I could find myself purchasing a few packs to replace trucks on MDC cars, but I wonder if the days of stand alone truck/coupler packs are coming to an end since no one produces cars with Rapidos and few modelers purchase resin car kits.
I'll buy some when they come out to check them out. I don't care to have working couplers, just couplers that'll hold a train together. It'd be nice to see the death of the rapido coupler.
See: Slack/Slinky Revisited - TrainBoard.com I thought to share the news here. Glad to see someone else picked up on it as well.
First, Concor's coupler will have the same problem as the McHenry's. That is, without a coupler box it is relegated to the replacement of existing couplers. Second, I would have liked it better if Concor came out with a semi automatic coupler rather than a dummy. Lifting one coupler over another to couple two cars together is time consuming and tedious expecially when doing unit trains. With the semi automatic you just push them together. Third, get rid of the fake trip pin.
Thanks, Concor A shorter shank would allow closer coupling. I like the McHenry except for the left-to-right coupler swing allowed by the coupler box. That excessive swing makes the McHenry unusable for my purposes of backing long strings of cars. I continue to use Micro Trains because of the short shank and the restricted swing motion of the coupler in the coupler box. I certainly welcome the Concor innovation. New ideas usually always help. This diagram above seems to indicate that the Concor coupler will also have this large left-to-right motion.
Looks nice though I don't like the thought of body mounted couplers.:thumbs_down: IMHO, the ability of truck mounted couplers to handle sharp radii is one of the pluses of N sale. I do micros and body mounted couplers just won't do. I've run standrad 40ft N truck mounted couplered rolling stock around 6" radius curves. If we move down the road to body mounts, I can see N scale having to have a much room needed as HO. :tb-mad: N scale, - tiny railroads with sharp radii for small spaces or long trains on huge sweeping curves. Take away the ability to make small railroads and we might as well be in HO again.:munhappy: Re the death of the Rapido, well, I like them.:thumbs_up: I run, don't switch much. They are bulky, over sized, simple, but folksy and they work for coupling and holding a train together. Grafar sliced them in half and they still work well and are compatible with full sized Rapidos. As long as these new couplers are truck mounted, I suppose eventually I'll have to move to them if I want to add new rolling stock. Remember, no matter how we dress them up, they are still toy trains.
I don't see how you figure that. Body mount is pretty much the norm now in HO scale, so moving to body mount in N scale will still mean that it will take about half the room of HO.
N scale started in Europe and is only now starting to shake off its European influence. The Rapido coupler was developed as a low cost functional coupler with no intention of being prototypical. In fact the prototype Euopean l coupling system could not be modeled. Now even Bachmann is introducing their own type of automatic knuckle coupler [looks similar to a McHenry]. So we may be witnessing the demise of the Rapido. That, however, is not to say that truck mounted couplers will go the way of the Dodo bird too. I suspect they will still be around years, even decades into the future.
i have hundreds of rapido couplers I just couldnt throw away. Maybe they will become so rare the stash I have will become valuable and make me rich!!!
CSX Robert. You may have a point.:tb-wink:The 9 3/4" radius N track may be okay for body mounted couplers. Havn't seen any at the LHS but if I do, I may get a couple and experiment as to how small a radius they will take. The smallest radius I every tried was 4" with a small switcher and Atlas ore cars. No Problem.:thumbs_up: I know body mounts woiuld never take that. When in HO I got down to 12" radius but that was about as small as I could go with body mounted couplers and that was a stretch.:tb-rolleyes:
The limit on radius for body-mounts depends on the length of the car. You can run up to 50' boxcars on 9" curves with body mounts without trouble (I do), but anything longer than that will create some problems. I suspect you could run a 33' twin-bay hopper with body mounts around a 6" curve. John C.
Since the Unimate couplers are virtually gone with little or no promise of resurrection, we need a budget coupler that fits everywhere, fits tightly, straight and is compatible with all of the major knuckles out there. Like Unimate did, at one time 8 for 2 bucks. Ken "FloridaBoy" Willaman
