BRAWA 50788

INFORMATION ABOUT THE PROTOTYPE

Tariff conditions on the one hand and technical conditions on the other led to the fact that all state railway administrations developed covered freight wagons with almost the same dimensions and loading weights. These were wagons with a wheelbase of 4.5 m, a length over buffers of 9.3 m for unbraked wagons, a loading weight of 15 t, later 17.5 t and a floor area of about 21 square meters. This type of freight wagon design became the most important and most frequently built covered freight wagon of all, they originally bore the generic sign Gm. The most common of these state railway cars was the one based on Prussian model sheet IId8, of which 47,533 were built alone. After the founding of the Deutsche Staatsbahn Wagen Verband DWV in 1909, the Verbandswagen type A2 was developed from it. This was built from 1911 in a total number of 121,770 copies. This made it the world's most widely built covered freight wagon. It dominated the image of German freight trains until the early Epoch 3. Due to two world wars, these wagons were scattered all over Europe, there was no European railway administration in which such wagons were not used at least temporarily.