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From: "pieter_roos" <pieter_roos@...>

In fact, for many years the Athearn/MDC and Kadee truck designs served
as somewhat defacto standards, although most of us became accustomed
to adding washers raise the car floor even on Athearn cars with
Athearn trucks to meet the standard coupler height.

Pieter,

Which in most cases, is actually the wrong solution! :-) If you do that, then the
Athearn car sits too high.

And recently, Athearn modified their bolsters on new cars so if you take old
Athearn trucks and put them under new cars, or put new trucks under older
Athearn cars, you'll immediately have problems!

I really don't think there is any compelling case for creating a "standard" that
anyone will follow, in the particular case of bolster heights.

It would be lovely to have a standard draft gear box and coupler shank design
to fit it, such that every coupler would sit properly in the box and not droop! But
even as practical as that would be for virtually ALL modelers, what are the
chances of getting such a standard accepted?

Tim