Train Couplers 101 - How do train cars stay together?

thank you what's up guys this is Heiss and today we are once again at the Colorado Railroad Museum in Golden Colorado and today we're going to take a neat look at all the different types of couplers that we can show off at the Museum a little bit of a tour of how trains have coupled together throughout history we have a lot of really cool historical examples of couplers from the very early days of railroading all the way up through what modern railroads use today so let's go take a look here shall we the first kind of coupler we have is the most basic this is what we call the Lincoln pin and not Lincoln pin link and pin the Lincoln pin is a super simple device you take a big typically forged iron or steel link you shove it in you drop the pin in the slot and now it's all tight together but of course you need to end up having that second pin on the second car and we moved away from Lincoln pin after a short time railroading for a very important reason and that is safety so let's analyze this a little bit if you have two train cars coupled together you want to limit how much they can move back and forth so how much of that sort of thing you can have going on because when you have two cars and one of them runs in or runs out it imparts little forces on the coupler itself and it can jerk whatever's in the car around and you multiply that times 20 or 50 or 100 and you can suddenly have a huge amount of force that can break things that can break these links quite easily and this is huge inch thick metal and so you can only have so much swap back and forth in the coupler we call this being intention or in Buff when we're all the way pressed up against and so the links couldn't be too super long because you didn't want to have too much slop in them and that meant that when you actually put these together with another car the other cars got to be pretty close and you can see that the link hangs down really far by gravity and that other coupler pocket's going to come to about right here so you have to hold this up with your precious fingers into the right spot until that other coupler comes in and shoves it in place it used to be the common saying on the railroad that you could tell a new Brakeman because he had all his fingers still the amount of fingers lost the amount of amputations injuries and otherwise that came along with Lincoln pin was quite significant and so pretty quickly the technology started to change now one question you might be having talking about limiting the forces between the cars is why not use something like a shock absorber to try and reduce that amount of load when the train goes from tension to compression and even in the Lincoln pin era the railroads did use that it's what we call draft gear right here outside the shop at the Colorado road Museum we have this Lincoln pin coupler it's original to the Denver South Park and Pacific Railroad and it has a very basic type of draft gear in it there would be two of these metal plates one on either side of the spring and then the overhang on the sides is what actually grabs the car and so as these plates hit the edge of travel the spring starts to compress and no matter which direction whether you're pushing on the couple this way or pulling it on it that way these coil springs right here will actually limit the impact of the load change this is a lot like the shock absorber on your car as your wheel hits down into a dip in the road you get that impact your suspension takes it we have the same thing but for train cars so if the engineer pulls out on the throttle too quick or somebody has to put the training emergency and stop really fast these Springs the draft gear will take care of it and cars to this day have something very similar although in modern railroading it gets a lot more complicated than that knuckle couplers started to be a thing in the late 1800s and ultimately became law in the 1900s but before Knuckles they did make some improvements to Lincoln pin to try and make it a little bit better we have this neat example right here from the Florence and Creek Railroad of Colorado which has been defunct for over a hundred years it's really neat that we have something from them but this is a semi-automatic Lincoln pin where the slot was tapered in such a way that you could set the pin in at an angle and then when the car comes in and hits you just had to have the link up in the right height and it would drop the pin automatically so rather than needing one hand holding the pin one hand holding the link you could focus on just holding the link and focus on getting your fingers out of the way at the right time rather than anything else so here behind me is business card B8 from the Denver and Rio Grande Western it's a great car and perhaps we'll feature it someday on the channel separately but the B8 along with many of the Rio Grande cars when they got modernized got what we call a Janie coupler now folks from around the world not just from the United States might think that a Janie is the only name for a knuckle coupler and in fact it is the name for the original patent for the knuckle coupler the knuckle style which is this style right here but we have many other styles and we make the important distinction because these couplers are very unique and have a lot of interesting and challenging features shall we say the coupler itself holds the force through the knuckle right here which can pivot on this pin and it's all held in place by this lever back here and this rotary pin in the back and so if we want to uncouple a car we have two levers one on either side we have the fat lever here it's really thick and then we have the skinny lever that's really thin right there the thing that gets frustrating with Janie's is one side is the push and one side is the pull because that rotary pin only opens the knuckle one way and it doesn't actually kick the knuckle open it just unlocks it so you'll end up shoving this and then the knuckle can come free the fat side is the push the skinny side is the pull and so in order for this to come free when you're pulling the train cars apart you have to hold it with your foot and give the engineer hand signals this way and that's not very ergonomic and as well it doesn't kick the knuckle open and when anything's wrong with that rotary pin back in there that holds it all together it's quite the challenge to get apart as we've seen in previous videos of mine that said the huge benefit over Lincoln pin is this oh okay let's face it I don't have the strength of a locomotive or train cars and this style coupler actually needs quite a bit of force to close but if I was a trained car and I hit that it would close and it closes automatically without your fingers being in the way the interesting challenge that comes with all that different force that you need though is that coupling these cars on curves is really challenging the couplers themselves are free to swivel to the left and right they do have limiting devices that are sprung to try and hold the coupler more or less centered but because you need all that Force to go straight back down the Janie a lot of times you can't get that force on the curve and you have to relocate the cars to A straight piece of track so it's far from ideal so when we hear someone from Europe refer to a modern knuckle as a Janie coupler that's why we get a little confused because the more modern stuff is a lot nicer now we're inside the shops at the Colorado Railroad Museum and behind me is Denver and Rio Grande Western coach number 284. 284 is an 1881 built coach and as I was saying with the B8 they got modernized to have janies which are the junk coupler that we don't like right so what did they have before well we can see right here that the expert Craftsman here at the Museum are replacing the end platform on this car it came time the hardware was rotten out and so was the wood so it's getting a new platform put on but what was originally slung down here rather than a Janie was what we call a Miller Hook and the Miller hook coupler is a very interesting coupler to study it's basically like the model train horn hook coupler but for real trains you'd push two of them together and they're sprung to be closed with a lever so if the lever was in the closed position it would spring them against the other one and then you just hoped they didn't come apart on a sharp curve there's a reason that not too many of those still exist there's a reason that Leighton and I upon seeing one at the Nevada state Railroad Museum had a minor nerd moment these are very uncommon because they really didn't work that well after janies had been around for quite some time out came a new knuckle coupler design the Sharon this is starting to look a lot more like what we have on modern day railroads and it's what a number of the locomotives and cars at the Colorado Railroad Museum actually utilize Sharon's are nice in that rather than the rotary pin they have a lifting pin so when you pull the cut lever so just by lifting that PIN you can automatically kick the knuckle open and you don't have to get in between train cars that are approaching each other further increasing safety huge technological upgrade and the Sharons work quite well and we really like him here at the Museum and then they also close much easier than the Janie with a very satisfying clink I might add now there is one thing that's interesting that you can take a look at here we just talked about how we had draft gear even in the Lincoln pin era so why does this coupler just have a pin there isn't any draft Gear Well the reason for that in this case is that this is the couple around the back of Denver and Rio Grande Western number 346's tender that means it's the first coupler in the train behind the locomotive it's really important to be able to absorb forces and any changes in things but you also want to have a precise amount of control and you don't want too much slop going around in a shorter train and so locomotives always have a pinned in coupler like this you can see diesel 4 big pinned and coupler big Jeep 30 there's a pinned coupler Connection in the back there that you can't see Lulu Bell another pinned coupler lots of different couplers just going straight to a pin and that was so the locomotive could impart its force and its power to the train without any delay and without any issue and then any inter-train forces got taken care of by the draft cure you want to be able to provide Power smoothly with the locomotive and easily and you want to know that as soon as you're applying it it's making it to the train and then as we propagate down hundreds of cars potentially then we start to account for that cushion more Modern Diesel locomotives like the 3011 here ended up getting a self-centering device installed so there is a simple pin but there's also some levers in there to hold this coupler centered and that made sure that when you went on curves and when slack ran in you didn't end up kicking the coupler anyway which could help prevent derailments when you're talking about using a lot of these pieces of Motive Power this is Denver and Rio Grande Western Caboose 0524 it's actually the oldest surviving Caboose from the Denver and Rio Grande Western and as such it's got some pretty cool kit on it I say it's pretty cool because it's historically cool operationally it's a bit of a pain this is an alternate design to the Sharon it's called the tower and rather than just having the pin that got lifted it also had this separate tower that got lifted as well this dual system proves to be quite annoying to actually get the PIN to pull he can pull the cut lever sometimes it would work sometimes it wouldn't I got pretty lucky on this one you also note that this knuckle features a very unique design features what we call a split knuckle this is what was used in the transition period between link and pin and knuckle couplers you could slot in a link into this split knuckle drop a pin in just like the hinge pin and then you could operate this coupler with Lincoln pin as well as any other knuckle coupler that could couple in just by using the knuckle they did ultimately go away though as you were able to hold less Force because of the split design of the knuckle and so once knuckles were everywhere he stopped seeing these around there were more manufacturers of knuckle couplers than just Sharon and Tower plenty of others as well but as the railroads got busier and busier and interchanged more and more different cars cars from one railroad going to another it became really important that we had common standards and couplers that worked really well and so we came up with the American Association of railroads or the AAR and we came up with a standard coupler design with the AAR this is an AAR Type e coupler this is a standard coupler designed by the AAR and in service on a number of different train cars still to this day although this is an e50 which is a smaller and older style and it's smaller and older because here it is on our Narrow Gauge Gramps tank car recently restored by the museum isn't it pretty with the AAR a knuckle we can see that it's a lot wider a lot bigger and has a different profile than the Sharons or the towers so it can handle a lot more Force and as well with the AAR we have a really really unique feature that is actually the way that couplers function to this day and that is actually how the coupler transmits Force we have our draft gear and centering device as we know and we talked about we come out to the coupler and when we're in buff we smoosh against these two surfaces right here when we're in tension pulling against the knuckle all of the force is actually riding through these coupler guts inside right here a lot of times folks think that this pin right here actually holds the force but it doesn't this is just the hinge pin this pin is just here so that you can actually swing the knuckle open when you pull the cut lever foreign you can see if you look at the profile of the knuckle itself now that it's swung out the swinging mechanism engages behind it here and all of the force rides on these two faces this huge thick casting that's the size of my hand is what transmits the force of the train and there's even bigger ones on more modern cars as well if you were to take this pin out and close the knuckle the train would still run you don't need this pin you could put a branch there and many times on the railroad when one of these goes missing one of these breaks something like that people have used all sorts of things to keep the trains running to illustrate my point pin out you pull on the coupler it's not going anywhere it's locked in by this part of the body the whole guts and everything but when you actually pull the cut lever once this pins out the knuckle will just fall away one of our Specialties here at the Colorado Railroad Museum because we have a lot of Narrow Gauge trains is dual gauge operations and dual gauge trains gauge is the distance between the two rails that the trains run on the outer two rails are standard gauge what most trains have and the inner two rails are three foot gauge three foot gauge was chosen for the mountainous terrain of Colorado and it was very prevalent throughout the years operating trains of two different gauges and interchanging cars and cargo between them became quite the interesting thing and as such they came up with quite the interesting setups and quite the interesting cars this is what we call an idler flat car it is a standard gauge flat car that has this special coupler pocket on the back and front it's called a tri-coupler pocket this middle coupler is at the height and spacing it for standard gauge this lower coupler is biased to one side for three rail dual gauge what we see right here is four rail dual gauge and we have it because of the turntable however much of the railroad instead of using the four rail dual gauge uses three rail dual gauge and here's how you switch from three rail to four rail but as such the Narrow Gauge is biased to the right and the standard gauge is biased to the left comparatively and so if you had an arrow gauge locomotive pulling a standard gauge car or a standard gauge locomotive pulling an arrow gauge car you needed to have offset knuckles both in height and in distance and so this was a unique dual setup where you could swap The Knuckle from the right side to the left side so no matter which way the bias was you could work with it some special switching locomotives took this concept even further though right here it's the Denver and Rio Grande Western number 50. it's a neat very unique switching locomotive it also worked on the Sumter Valley Railway as the 101 for a long time has some aspects of steam engine to it doesn't it but the neat thing about the 50 is that it had its own Tri coupler setup with the t-slotted coupler they can actually raise the whole coupler assembly and move it over into either slot to work with standard gauge on either side as this is an air gauge switcher the railroads really did come up with a lot of cool solutions for all the unique problems that they did run into here on the end of the Union Pacific passenger coach we have the most modern type of knuckle coupler that we have this is an AAR type f it's just like the type e but it's got these extra Wings on the side the extra Wings interlock like this and they help with the buff forces when the train comes into buff and as well they help keep things centered as with many things in railroading it took us a little bit to get the right solution starting with something simple something easy and then finding a slightly more complex but intricate and beautiful solution that helped improve safety and helped keep both the railroad workers and everyone around the railroad safe the Advent couplers is a huge thing for the United States and finding the right knuckle that works great is excellent and a coupler that's in good service is pretty hard to beat so it's kind of surprising that much of the world has not joined us with our knuckle couplers but I hope you guys liked this look at the different couplers of the locomotives and cars here at the Colorado Railroad Museum special thanks to the Colorado Railroad Museum for letting me come film here lots of neat artifacts lots of awesome stuff to see so make sure you come check out the museum next time you're out in Golden and I hope you guys learned a thing or two as always if you have any questions please leave them down in the comments below thanks for watching oh [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Hyce

Views: 1,466,729

Keywords: trains, railroad, how trains work, steam trains, train game, train crash, train wreck

Id: IEX6_GRk6sU

Length: 22min 0sec (1320 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 09 2023