I don't know what sort of modeling you do. I'm in a modular club, and we have the capability of running some long trains on the mainlines. We have found that the Kadees work very well. The rest of the variuos "Kadee knock off" brands have serious problems. All of the others except McHenry use a plastic "leaf" spring to close the knuckle. At the last G.A.T. show I attended I bought a Spectrum consolidation, put on the Bachmann couplers since I didn't have spare Kadees with me and used the loco to pull short trains and do some switching. The maximum number of cars I pulled was probably 7 or 8 with a cabboose. After a couple of hours of running, the knuckle springs were starting to weaken on the Bachmann couplers with the knuckles starting to stretch out. Since Kaddee has come out with the #58 scale size coupler, all of my future coupler conversions will be to #58's. A couple of years ago I tried some Intermountain couplers on some cars on a train of about 30 cars. Within 15 minutes of pulling a 30 car train on the modular layout, couplers were letting go.
