Is Bachman RailChief coupler height standard? What mfr carswill/will not lineup?

[ChicagoJim]

Hi,

Backstory:
I'm racing to acquire necessary items for my son's 9th birthday in about 10 days -- he wants an HO train for his birthday.

In transit (as I write this) is the Bachmann RailChief BNSF train set that he has his heart set on


I"m surfing websites (to add to that train set) either new or old gondola cars (he wants lots of gondola cars to put stuff in -- that's what he does with Grandpa's WWII American Flyer (although that is O, not HO).

Main/Important Question #1:
Will all manufacturers' (vintage or recent) rolling stock coupler HEIGHT line up with this Bachmann set?

Question #2:
Anything I should watch out for when replacing EZMate couplers to Hornhook?  (yes, I want horn hook).

Based on personal experience as a child, only the horn hook couplers will survive a 9 year old's play.

Back in the 1970s as a child (I'm an old dad), my dad converted my childhood HO Athern/Roundhouse cars to Kadee.
But as a 9 year old back then, I just destroyed those Kadee couplers (which pained my father).

Separately: I'd be forever grateful if anyone one has horn hook couplers they've since removed that they'd be willing to donate to get a 9 y.o. excited about MRR  

Thanks in advance for the help,
Jim

[jward]

The short answer to your question is that anybody's cars that meet the NMRA standard for coupler height should match up with your cars. As long as they are the same type (Knuckle) as what's in your set.

As for converting to horn hooks, I don't know how feasible that is anymore. Most manufacturers do not install them on their cars or even include them in kits anymore. Since most of us didn't save them back in the day, they may be a little hard to find. There were numerous different variations on the mounting, with some cars like Tyco using a version with a narrow pivot hole and others like Athearn using a wider hole that would fit almost anything. And AHM used some bizarre version that included a metal spring. If you're going to look on Ebay for them I'd look for the wider hole version.

You may want to make a conversion car with a knuckle coupler on one end and a horn hook on the other as a temporary way to run cars of different types in the same train.

[rich1998]

I am sure you will find some cars on ebay.

Rich

[Gearedenginefreak]

IF I can find my old horn hooks, you can have them. I saved them because I just could not bring myself to throw them out. As I recall, I had a bag with hundreds of them.  Tyco, Bachman, AHM, Athearn and others.  I will search later today. We are supposedly going to be in a snow apocalypse this weekend in Colorado, so that will be a good diversion for me.
I will report back here if I find them.

Tom

[Terry Toenges]

Hornhooks are also know as X2F couplers.
Athearn and Walthers Cornerstone couplers are the big hole ones.
Lifelike makes small hole ones. Walthers now owns Lifelike.

[Len]

The small hole Life-Like horn-hook couplers were part of their 'Life-Like', P/N 1433 and 'Scene Master', P/N 1410, lines. You can still find them on line with a bit of searching, but supplies are limited.

When Walthers took over Life-Like they dropped the 'Scene Master' P/N and just kept the 'Life-Like' horn hooks as P/N 433-1433 on a "while supplies last" basis. They have since sold out and have been discontinuted, along with a number of other types and styles of horn hooks from other manufacturers. Only their own large hole horn hooks are still available, for now.

Which makes sense from a marketing point of view. For most people, horn hooks were a hassle. And when Kadee's patent ran out, almost all new production switched to knuckle couplers because of the demand. It doesn't make sense to keep making something there's almost no market for.

I think the only reason the large hole horn hooks are still around is because there's such a huge number of "blue box" Athearn cars that used them still around. And some folks have so many, it's not worth the expense to switch them all to knuckle couplers. But I suspect there will come a day when even the large hole horn hooks also go away.

And one way to make knuckle couplers easier for small hands to manage is to clip the "glad hand" off just below the knuckle. Then they will not get tangled up in the coupler when a young engineer tries to lift a car off the track.

Len