sticking its nose in and telling you that's actually cow you're eating and not road kill. why is there government inspection of that privately produced product? this is a link and pin coupling system. this used to be the industry standard for how you linked railway cars together, and for whatever reason, this is what railroad companies liked. this is what they built for their cars. even though brakemen frequently got their finger os hands ripped off, the companies liked it. this is what they used. this is what they had been using for decades. why change? it would be expensive to have to do it another way. until 1893 when the federal government banned those types of couplings and forced railroad companies to use something that wouldn't rip the hands off their employees of that was 193. the safety appliance act.