Question on an Atlas box car coupler

The cars are all plastic and light weight.  I have a few of the cars, I cut the pin that hangs down from the coupler  off on my cars. They will couple up to the Lionel/3rail couplers.

Thanks Keith, that is what I needed to know.  BTW, that is quite the load! Are you cracking hydrocarbons?

I just built it to haul around with a idler car (Menard's long flat car).

The load is for low pressure hydrocarbons. The load would weight too much for the rail car if it had as much steel in it as needed to work at the high pressures and temps need to crack hydrocarbons.

hokie71 posted:

I don't own any older Atlas cars and occasionally one comes up on that auction site -but it appears to have couplers like this.  Do these work with the typical O claw coupler? Thanks for input.

As mentioned, these do couple well with the o-gauge coupler. I love these cars; the trucks are about a good-looking as 3RO trucks get. The cars are light, but that's why lead (if you don't want a load) was invented. 

The tooling (I think that the cars were made in Austria in the 60's), which included stock cars, boxcars, gondolas and a reefer/plug-door boxcar I believe, has survived and re-appeared as part of the new Atlas Trainman line.

Thanks D500, they do appear to have great detail and I think you are right about the Austria connection.  (that is not exactly a low price labor area is it? the 60s was a different world.)

The cars were made by Roco in Austria for Atlas in the 1970s, when Atlas got into the business of selling locomotives and freight cars in N. HO and O scale. Prior to that, Atlas was all about tracks and buildings.

The coupler looks good, but does not have an operating knuckle, so it doesn’t always work so smoothly with traditional O gauge knuckle couplers, especially if weight isn’t added to those very lightweight cars.