For the October issue of Garden Rail, I've increased my Binnie skip train to 10 wagons. This is lovely, but also fiddly to assemble at the track. Like many other large scale fans, I use bath plug chain for couplings, which means my flight box has bags of three and four link lengths of chain in the bottom.
Coupling is easy, but fiddly, looping the chain over the hooks on the ends of each piece of rolling stock. Plenty of dropped, and lost chain during the day, it's a good job the stuff is cheap!
For the skips, I wondered if I could fit one end of the chain to the wagon, so coupling just involved flipping the free end over the hook.
With a bit of fiddling, I managed to fix the chain in place with a U-shaped piece of staple, forced into the ABS the wagon is made from, with a hot soldering iron. Holding the U with tweezers seemed the least faffy way to do the job. That and accepting the chain would be pinned, but not perfectly behind the nail used as a hook.
Experiments seem to prove this will work, and hopefully save me a bit of time trackside.
Update: I've now had the chance to try these out, and they work every bit as well as I hoped!
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