Marklin's Re 4/4 - Improving the looks - 2 - Pilot/coupler

The next obvious thing to tackle on the Re 4/4 is the couplers situation...

Now I'm actually OK with the big, horny, clunky, Marklin coupler in general. It may not be pretty, but it does the job. Changing them all to Microtrains would be a big time-suck and an expense for little improvement in looks and no improvement in functionality - indeed they'd probably be less-reliable with my luck. 

As for their clunky aesthetics, I don't actually think people will be peering up close between the wagons on a layout like Wassen, so the only horrible Marklin coupler that it really makes sense to fret about is the one at the front of the train, as that is where most people look.

Obviously I don't need a coupler at the front of a lead loco, as I'm not running around trains or doing complex bidirectional shunting moves (I doubt many people are in Z scale...)  But most of my trains are double-headed, so some locos need couplers at both ends.

So the plan is to remove the coupler from one end of a few of my locos and replace it with the 'pilot/headstock/cowcatcher' at that end.

If this was done cleverly, the pilot would be attached to the chassis rather than the bodyshell. This would allow shells to be swapped out so that, for example, my blue SBB Cargo 4/4 might sometimes be seen in the lead and might sometimes be the second engine.

So one of the bogies was detached from the chassis and it's coupler removed. Some of the cast-on pilots and a little extra plastic was removed from the front corners of the bogie to provide more clearance between the bogie and my new pilot while swiveling. You can see the angled pilot faces carefully glued to two rectangles of styrene in the corners of the chassis below.

This means there are no issues with bogie clearance, but if there is a collision, the thing is going to come adrift. Perhaps some tiny screws in the corners (or even some brass rod) through the chassis and into these blocks might make things more likely to survive future altercations.

The curved corner pieces being made up from styrene pipe:

And attached in this blurry pic:

A few bits of (grossly oversize) brass wire later:

Hardly dramatic, but it looks a little better closeup. Next time the detailing might be a little finer...