Hod Carrier
LMS Railcar 18
I'd been playing around with some Technic trying to come up with a reasonable way of close coupling vehicles when I happened on this arrangement of parts. As you can see, it permits a sort of floating pivot point along what is almost a straight line. The advantage of this is that it would permit two vehicles to be close coupled on straights but gives sufficient clearance for curves and movement of the vehicles relative to each other.
The original idea had been that this would be used for bogie vehicles. The mechanism would be mounted within the body of the vehicle with a straight bar coupler to join the vehicles together. Because each vehicle would centre correctly due to the bogies making reference to the track, this should not need anything additional for the geometry to work. At present, I have not had any time to build or test this.
LMS Railcar 18
I'd been playing around with some Technic trying to come up with a reasonable way of close coupling vehicles when I happened on this arrangement of parts. As you can see, it permits a sort of floating pivot point along what is almost a straight line. The advantage of this is that it would permit two vehicles to be close coupled on straights but gives sufficient clearance for curves and movement of the vehicles relative to each other.
The original idea had been that this would be used for bogie vehicles. The mechanism would be mounted within the body of the vehicle with a straight bar coupler to join the vehicles together. Because each vehicle would centre correctly due to the bogies making reference to the track, this should not need anything additional for the geometry to work. At present, I have not had any time to build or test this.