It seems kind of silly to have an article about how to uncouple S-scale cars, but this simple act baffled me for some time. I have read on the Yahoo S-scale mailing list about others who have problems uncoupling these couplers, so I'm not alone in this. After some experimenting I finally figured out what it took to uncouple. At first I thought it was the S-Helper Service couplers I was using. However, I tried a car with Kadee couplers and found the same problem.

I have created a simple animation to show how I uncouple the cars. It is a .GIF animation so the colors are wrong, but you get the idea.

This article is provided to help others who find this act a challenge at first. The following photos show the process in still images. These are two S-Helper Service couplers; one on a freight car and one on an engine.

In N-scale I used a round, wooden toothpick. When you push it in between the two couplers and give it a twist, the couplers uncouple. I tried the same thing in S-scale and it just wouldn't work. I tried a bigger device, but still no luck. Finally, through experimentation, I found that if you insert the wooden toothpick against the back corner of one of the couplers (in this case the one belonging to the engine)...

...it just snaps open and the couplers disengage.

The key is the almost triangular shaped wedge (pointed to in this next photo) in the back corner of the coupler. When you insert a toothpick into that location and press against that piece, the coupler uncouples.

By the way, the tool I use to uncouple the cars is a pen flashlight with a built-in LED to which I taped a round, wooden toothpick. This shines a light in the, typically, dark space where the couplers are and makes it much easier to see what you are doing.