The steel medium fitted open merchandise wagon was probably the first new design of wagon introduced by BR which did not have a clear antecedent on the pre-Nationalisation railway. They built 3,600 of them all on diagram 1/019 but with two distinctive designs of brake rigging and suspension - the LMS clasp style and the RCH standard. All were vacuum braked when new. They had a limited life in the revenue fleet, the engineers appear to have got hold of most of them by 1970 and many earlier than this. With their drop side the engineers found them very useful, using them for spoil, sand, ballast as well as more specialist uses. In later years the vacuum brake was often removed. They generally went out of use in the late 1980s as the new Rudds, Clams and Turbots were introduced in large numbers. The photographs show how varied the use was, and how widely they spread across the system. Some are in unusual colours. Parkside Dundas and Genesis make 4mm kits for these. A drawing and number series details are in Bartlett et al (1984) BR Illustrated wagons OPC. "BR Covered hopper wagon"
