Thursday, November 10, 2011

Tutorial: Cushioned Drawbars

Today I am sharing a video James and I made in July. James figured out a simple way to add working cushioned drawbars to model trains, and this video explains how. It is very easy to do, and adds that much realism to your freight cars. On the real trains, cushioned drawbars help to protect the load in the car by absorbing some of the impact during coupling, so the load doesn't move around as much. A lot of box cars and flat cars are equipped with these.

James and I hope to post videos more often, so be on the lookout for those! If you haven't already, you can subscribe to our YouTube channel and see videos there that we haven't posted here.

Anyways, my rant is over. Enjoy the video!

2 comments:

Tyler said...

Any possibility of a video showing the results once installed on a car? (using the force of a model locomotive, not that of a giant hand)

James said...

We'll see what we can come up with for a video showing the results on model operations. What we have found is that because model trains are not typically very heavy, the cushioning really absorbs very little when the car is at the end of the train or on a short train. We did find that on trains that are a little longer (20+ cars) the cushioning did work pretty well when the car was placed towards the head end of the train. We found that the cushioning did absorb some of the slack run ins, when stopping and shoving, simply because there was more weight behind it pushing on it. We will try to put together a video of that in the near future.