Railway Coupling - Link and Pin

Link and Pin

The link-and-pin coupling was the original style of coupling used on American railways, surviving on forestry railways after others converted to Janney couplings. While simple in principle, the link-and-pin coupling suffered from a lack of standardisation regarding size and height of the links and the size and height of the pockets.

The link-and-pin coupler consisted of a tubelike body that received an oblong link. During coupling, a railworker had to stand between the cars as they came together and guide the link into the coupler pocket. Once the cars were joined, the employee inserted a pin into a hole a few inches from the end of the tube to hold the link in place. This procedure was exceptionally dangerous and many brakemen lost fingers or entire hands when they did not get their hands out of the way of the coupler pockets; many more were killed as a result of being crushed between cars or dragged under cars that were coupled too quickly. Brakemen were issued with heavy clubs that could be used to hold the link in position, but many brakemen would not use the club, and risk injury.

The link-and-pin coupler proved unsatisfactory because:

• It made a loose connection between the cars, with too much slack action.

• There was no standard design, and train crews often spent hours trying to match pins and links while coupling cars.

• The links and pins were often pilfered (due to their value as scrap metal), resulting in substantial replacement costs. John H. White suggests that the railroads considered this to be more important than the safety issue at the time (see reference below).

• Crew members had to go between moving cars during coupling, and were frequently injured and sometimes killed.

• Eventually, railroads wished to operate trains that were heavier than the link-and-pin system could cope with.

An episode of the 1950s TV series Casey Jones was devoted to the problems of link-and-pin couplings.