Even more Van Dorn couplers

Our friend Bill Wulfert continues to roam around the museum and gather photos of Van Dorn couplers in the museum's collection. This week's haul includes both link-and-pin and MCB types.

First, Bill made an intriguing discovery about the Metropolitan-West Side Elevated cars, namely that they have different couplers at their motor ends than they do at their trailer ends. The photos show the #4A couplers at the motor ends of these cars. As previously noted, these cars have #18 couplers at their trailer ends. The #4A is the same type as our Northwestern Elevated cars have. It's not at all unlikely that some, or maybe all, of our wooden 'L' cars had couplers changed around at some point during their service lives.

The Milwaukee Electric was apparently a big user of Van Dorn MCB style couplers. Here's the coupler at one end of steeplecab L10. Unfortunately Van Dorn didn't cast coupler numbers into their MCB couplers as prominently as they did on their link-and-pin varieties.

Here's one of the couplers on Milwaukee Electric 1129, which is on display in Barn 6 masquerading as car 1111. It too has a Van Dorn MCB of indeterminate type. 

EDIT: Close inspection on Sunday revealed that the 1129 has a type 930 MCB coupler. An exploded-view illustration of this type was included among the donated Van Dorn materials but, intriguingly, the illustrated version looks somewhat different than what's on the car. Apparently they made changes to the casting at some point.