*** You actually have horn-hooks that won't couple? First I've ever heard of that happening. ***
----------------------------------------------------- I can remember back in my HO days (the 1960s) with horn hooks. Sometimes I couldn't get 'em to couple and I never could uncouple them once they were coupled. Ah, those were good times.
Bill Bill's Railroad Empire N Scale Model Railroad:
"The CB&Q Guy" wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com:
My opinion is that horn hooks have driven about as many people out of the hobby as anything going. Back in the 1960's when I was in the hobby the first time, I converted all of my cars to Kadee Magne Matics. And, that was when I was a teenage kid, living in S.E. Oklahoma and had to mail-order everything, and I mean everything. This was just after the delayed-action feature was introduced, and there were still some purely mechanical Kadees on the market. (Anybody remember them? They had a wire pin that hung straight down from the knuckle and the uncoupling ramps had to be solenoid mounted so as to retract, IIRC.)
I figured out how to manually uncouple them with a piece of wire that I would use to snag the pin on one of the Magne-Matics.
Horn hooks are a disaster. And, they look like crap.
I just checked and they are not currently in stock at Walthers. There web site shows them "in transit", so they should show up sooner or later. They are listed at $4.98 for 4 pairs.
I don't know what part of the country your in, but if you don't want to wait I know Tom's Train Station in Raleigh, NC has them currently in stock. Their number is (919) 388-7246.
Most of my stuff has been converted to KD's or McHenry's. I still keep a couple of the Magic-Mate transition cars around though for when the Grand-Kids come to visit and bring their old Tyco and Model Power stuff along. I painted the roofs primer grey and the roofwalks primer red to make them easy to spot.
Len Head Rust Scraper KL&B Eastern Lines RR Museum
I've always wondered something: why did nobody seem to make any serious attempt to adapt the N-scale system to HO? They're excellent couplers-- one piece (and a small spring-- I'd bet a csst-on spring's a real option in HO size boxes), idiot-proof coupling, and easily seperated. ISTR that Kadee offered a snap-on system to magnetise them too.
While oversized for N, the same size is forgivable at HO; I could see some minor tweaks to the outer edges to make them look a little less obvious.
Someone proposed it in an MR or RMC article IIRC. Why did nobody show interest? A 25 year window existed (from the late 60s growth of N to the mid-90s depatenting of the Kadee) where it presented a valid choice.
Probably because Kadee and MicroTrains started out as the same company, owned by two brothers. When they split up the business and went their seperate ways, one took the HO side and the other the N side. In old, full-retail-or-better hobby shops you might still find N scale couplers marked "Kadee" instead of "MicroTrains".
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