Question about British railways

bigkid posted:

So watching a video that happened to have a British steam railway as part of it (the channel itself involves the UK canals and the people who live/cruise on them in the so called "Narrow boats, gotta love the UK's efforts at preserving things like the canal network, that is like 2500 miles of canals). Anyway, I finally got a good luck at how they couple cars together, and figured out they use a link and pin connection with the buffers (hydraulic I assume arms on each car that keep the cars under tension). My question is, why didn't the UK railways adopt something like the Janney knuckle coupler? It seems to me the link and pin they use is just as in-efficient and dangerous as the ones they used in the US. 

The UK railroads don't operate long heavy trains, like in the US, as their train braking system is vacuum. Thus shorter trains, without slack, those hook and buffers work well for them.

When the Foster Yeoman Rock Co. purchased 4 EMD twin cab locomotives to handle much larger rock trains (Foster Yeoman got the contract for the Chunnel Construction project), and all the rock cars were equipped with U.S. couplers.

Thanks, that makes sense, and also why vacuum brakes work, if the trains are generally shorter and lighter than they would work okay, too. I was just reading a history of the air brake, and they mentioned that vacuum brakes had been tried but didn't work well for the reason the trains were too long. 

Air brakes are standard in the UK and have been so for perhaps the last twenty years or so. Most passenger rolling stock of a certain vintage was fitted with buckeye type couplings which has a screwlink coupling in the middle of it, difficult to explain but it worked. 

n.