The MGR air-braked coal hoppers was the largest fleet of air-braked wagons ever to be constructed by BR and it is hard to believe that the wagons have all but gone, initially in favour of high capacity coal hoppers such as the HYA (recently announced by Accurascale) and more recently, biomass wagons.
Built between 1964 and 1982, they have been subject to variations and conversions, creating a family of wagons that includes the CDA china clay covered hopper wagons, HFA wagons designed to run at higher speeds and other variations including canopied hopper wagons.
The family does not stop at the MGR: whilst worn out wagons were scrapped as coal traffic dwindled, around 1000 underframes were reused from 1997 by EWS to build box wagons for spoil and ballast, coded MHA, many of which remain in use today.
Triple wagon packs
The potential for developing a high-fidelity model of such an important wagon family is being grasped by Cavalex Models and by the time the announcement was made, the model had progressed to tooling with delivery pencilled in for the third quarter of 2021.
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