5th wheel hitch questions

IdaD wrote:

austingta wrote:
I'm leaning toward the Andersen as well. With the required gooseneck it will cost me 1500 bucks though. Seems pretty steep, but I"ll need rails anyway no matter what hitch I buy.

Maybe I'm reading this wrong but I'm confused. Andersen has a couple of configurations. One requires a gooseneck ball installed in the truck, and it attaches to the gooseneck ball. The other requires the industry standard fifth wheel rails - no gooseneck is needed in the truck.

My truck came without factory prep so it was a blank slate, and I opted to install a set of custom Curt rails so I could use the rail mount version of the Andersen. I think it ran a couple hundred bucks from etrailer and it was a pretty easy install job. The cool thing about the rails is versatility - you can use any rail mount hitch and you can even drop a rail mount gooseneck plate on it to use with a standard gooseneck style utility or stock trailer. I also felt like the rail mount setup was more robust than the gooseneck setup that transmits some of the dynamic load to the bed.