Glad hand length?

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ICG/SOU

ICG/SOU

HO & O (3-rail) trainman
My apologies if this topic wasn't discussed before. I didn't find what I was looking for in a search.

Last night I did my first DCC session, and just used two of my locos and a caboose (to learn the layout and how to run DCC). Something I noticed after a few minutes is that both my locomotives (Athearn SD40s with Kadee #5s) have snow plows on the front ends. When running a consist with one forward, one rearward facing, the glad hand on the caboose would butt up against the snow plow, and the leading caboose truck would be lifted up a few millimeters. It wouldn't be enough to derail, but I removed the caboose anyway, and just ran the locomotives.

My question is this: is there a standard length that the glad hands need to be so that this problem doesn't occur? If not, would it just be better to remove the snow plows on all locomotives, or go with a longer shanked coupler?

Anyone else had this problem? Thanks.
 
Are we talking about the uncoupling trip pin? Cut it off (kidding). Honestly, the only real solution would be to add a slightly longer coupler to the front of a locomotive that has a plow on the pilot.
 
Do you actually use the trip pins for magnetic delayed uncouping? If not, cutting them off is a good idea since they just get in the way and your couplers will look better. If you do use them for uncoupling, getting a longer shank coupler like Josh suggested is the correct answer, assuming your prototype locomotive had a plow and you want to keep it on your model.
 


Josh,

That sounds like what I'll do. I didn't want to remove all my snowplows, nor just designate some locomotives without plows as being rear facing only.

Thanks again.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
I'm talking about the curved thing that comes down and looks like it would be a air hose or something on the coupler, so I guess it is the trip pin.

I personally don't use them, and probably won't since I use a skewer to uncouple. I didn't want to cut them off of all my rolling stock, so using a longer shanked coupler will be the way I go.
 
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