Today I bought 2 Athearns "assemble them yourself" cars. They have the knuckle couplers and are mounted on the body and not the truck. It's been along time since I put a "model" together but with patience and some duct tape ( just kidding ) they both came out real nice! I went down to my layout with a big grin and started to line em' up with one of my Bachmann Locos. The Bachmann's coupler is higher! Just enough to uncouple even at slow speed. SO, I tried the other Bachmann...same thing!
ARGH!
I just got a shipment of 15 blue-box Athearn freight cars myself from Toy Train Heaven this week and got done putting a lot of them together.. At less than $6 a pop I couldn't resist.
Compared to older BB kits with the chronic low-coupler problem as Russ mentioned, I find that most of the ones in my shipment have good coupler height.. Looks like Athearn did some retooling with their most recent BB kits.
The only ones in my BB shipment with low coupler heights are the cabooses... I had to use Kadee #47 underset couplers to get the right height with those.
I'd say it's most likely those Bachmanns have couplers mounted too high. Maybe you should get overset Kadees for them.
One of the reasons why I bought those BB kits was because I was setting up a Christmas Tree circle.. Very pleased with the result. I got an Athearn BB Super Weight F7 (which also required underset Kadee #47s) pulling a string of BB kits on a 15" (!) radius around the Christmas Tree, and by golly does it look good doing it! :thumb:
(BTW the F7 has the close-coupling mod I did, and it looks mighty good, even on 15"r!) train97