In a recent article I looked at a coupler type that became the standard in American OO, the Kadee coupler. But there were other options for automatic couplers. And one type did see some use that we would not have guessed would have been used, the X2F coupler.

Of course, this type of coupler we associate today with HO scale train sets. But it was a new and exciting design at one point in time. The first advertising I found for the X2F using the Railroad Magazine Index dates to January of 1955, on page 21 of Model Railroader.

Where this gets interesting for us is it was not only a HO coupler, some OO gaugers made use of it. In this site I had previously posted a photo of a Kemtron Geep on the layout of Pierre Bourassa in 1965 with the X2F couplers, and periodically cars have turned up with these couplers.

In my own case I have managed to accumulate a small group of these cars. My guess is they are from the Bourassa layout. This stock car is a particularly nice example of the model. It must date to the pre-war era, with the great set of SC decals, but time rolls on and people did modify things.

These two reefers below would also appear to either be from Bourassa or one of his Canadian OO friends The one in the front is Scale-Craft (postwar) and in the back is built on a Picard body.

Returning to the stock car featured today, my guess is that at some point maybe around 1960 this model picked up a set of die cast metal X2F couplers. They do couple up nicely, although are a bit more of a challenge to uncouple than other designs. Still, they are an interesting footnote to the coupler debate in the American OO world.