I recently got two sets of PRMLOCO WAMU80000 box cars, in blue and brown; blue set pictured below. S-l500 by raganim posted Oct 19, 2016 at 8:48 AM They're cheap for a set of three box cars, so they were a good way to round out my freight operations. The quality is definitely nowhere close to that of Rokuhan, but they seem to work overall fine and look nice enough. Except automatic coupling. I need to couple them manually, even to each other. You cannot just roll them against each other and have them couple together. You need to gently lift one car and set it back down. Does anyone else have these cars and can verify that manual coupling is expected? They are mini arnold couplers, which combines well with Rokuhan stock. They look pretty much permanently attached to the trucks. For the price, I'm happy either way.
I analyzed these in more detail this morning. The bottom floor of the box car pops off. The couplers sit inside a small box attached to that floor. The problem looks like the couplers are unable to rise high enough to couple effectively to each other in an automatic way. The box housing the coupler might be able to pop off - it is attached with two small plastic tabs inserted into the bottom of the box car. I guess that is body-mounted, then, not truck-mounted? In my original post, I felt that the only shortcoming was a lack of automatic coupling, but I have run into some other problems. On tight curves, one or two of the couplers can semi-consistently uncouple, even at slow speeds. Particularly happens if the problem car is toward the front of the train and is therefore pulling more weight. The cars themselves are very, very light. I am considering adding some weight to these cars to see if that helps them staying coupled in various situations. Perhaps the cars get lifted up under pressure due to the light weight, resulting in an involuntary uncoupling. Some fishing split shots should fit inside the box car cavities no problem. Otherwise, to solve automatic coupling - maybe I'd need to replace the couplers. I am unsure if these are even replaceable with something else, however.
