🤩 Rapido Announce Newly Tooled GER 5 & 7 Plank Wagons

Rapido Trains UK have announced a newly tooled range of Great Eastern Railway Diagram 17 & Diagram 48 5 and 7 plank wagons in OO Gauge! 

Rapido is heading east and expanding their range of Great Eastern Railway models with their brand new GER 5 & 7 plank all-purpose General Merchandise Open Wagons. They will feature body tooling variants to cover Diagram 17 5-planks, Diagram 48 7-planks and Diagram 48 7-plank conversions.

They offer the usual wealth of full external, internal and underframe details including different brakes, door types, builder's plate styles, buffers, axleboxes, safety loops and brake lever guards. All models feature Great Eastern style 8-spoke wheels with distinctive retaining rings and are finished off with brass bearings, NEM coupling pockets and a high quality livery application.

Engineering prototypes have already been received, the order book is open and you can pre-order yours right now!

The Great Eastern Railway operated a vast network of lines serving Northeast London's densely populated suburbs and East Anglia’s agrarian market towns, villages, coastal resorts and ports. General merchandise traffic dominated the company’s goods receipts and further grew in importance during the 1890s, while mineral traffic maintained a steady growth. This area of the country was devoid of heavy industry and mines, so the company imported coal mainly from Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire collieries.

In the 1890s the company prepared against any disruption of its supply or services from strike action by employing a finely-tuned and aggressive coal-buying policy which paid dividends during the miners’ strike of 1893 and 1912. Huge stockpiles at all the major depots waxed and waned in size as prices fluctuated, and to supplement the company’s dedicated locomotive coal trucks during times of heavy purchasing, a fleet of reliable all-purpose wagons suitable for carrying both general merchandise and minerals were built to help transport coal to the region from the Midlands.

The humble high-sided open wagon was the mainstay of the fleet, with Diagram17s being the most numerous of them all.

Diagram 17

Designed to replace the ageing 8-ton and 9-ton timber framed wagons of the 1870s and 1880s, the Diagram 17s were a robust steel framed 5-plank wagon with a 9ft wheelbase, a set of doors on either side and an improved 10-ton load capacity. 12,050 examples were constructed between 1893 and 1903, accounting for 65% of the company’s wagons built during this period, and by the time the last one rolled off the production line they constituted 45% of the company’s total number of goods wagons.

In general use, they travelled way beyond the boundaries of the GER network delivering goods up and down the country. Wagons of the same design were built for the Lancashire, Derbyshire and East Coast Railway by outside contractors. The GER had offered the LD&ECR financial and political support which helped the relevant Bills pass through parliament. There weren’t altruistic acts by the Great Eastern Railway, but made under the proviso that the company would have running powers over the LD&ECR system, with full access to the area’s rich coalfields.

In 1907 the LD&ECR was absorbed by the Great Central Railway, which acquired all of the company’s rolling stock, including those built to the GER design. Under their new owner, the wagons were repainted in the GCR livery and given new running numbers accordingly.

Diagram 48

In early 1903 while wagons of the final order of Diagram 17 were under construction, the GER was busy preparing a new 7-plank design with both an increased carrying capacity and an improved load retention for low-weight but high-volume goods. Within two months a prototype of the new 7-plank design had been completed by converting an existing 5-plank Diagram 17 wagon originally built in 1898.

Trials of the wagon were successful, although the oil axle boxes which increased its load capacity to 12 tons proved to be unnecessary, and by the end of the year, the first examples of the new 10-ton production series rolled out of the workshop. Construction of the Diagram 48 wagons continued until the summer of 1908, by which time a total of 1300 had been built. To further increase the number in service at a minimal cost an additional 650 wagons were converted to Diagram 48 from earlier 5-plank designs between 1904 and 1911.

Although grouped under a single diagram, there were distinct visual differences between new builds and conversions, the most prominent being the length of the diagonal side braces. All new builds appear to have had the diagonal ironwork extended to the 7th plank, while many (but not all) of the conversions retained the original braces to the 5th plank only.

Later life

Wagons to both Diagrams 17 and 48 began to receive upgrades as various parts were damaged or worn out in service. During the Edwardian period, new open-fronted brake lever guards and ribbed buffers were introduced, and by the early 1920s some wagons had been fitted with a second brake lever, the Morton reversions clutch, and a third brake block. Most of these wagons survived through to the grouping era, and under LNER ownership it was decided that those built from 1897 onwards had sufficient working life expectancy to be given a full range of improved parts as they passed through the Works for repairs. Any wagons in this category that were not already fitted with them were given B1-type oil axle boxes, ribbed buffers, and the improved brake gear.

More than 400 of the wagons survived Nationalisation, but increasingly their twilight years were spent allocated to major depots and yards in the Eastern region as internal use wagons, or in Departmental service serving a wide variety of roles including Signal & Telegraph, Permanent Way and even breakdown trains. Although the final examples had disappeared from revenue service by the mid-1950s, the Departmental and internal user wagons soldiered on into the 1960s.