Goods wagons

Goods wagons or freight wagons (North America: goods cars or freight cars) are unpowered railway vehicles that are used for the transportation of cargo. A variety of wagon types are in use to handle different types of goods, but all goods wagons in a regional network typically have standardized couplers and other fittings, such as hoses for air brakes, allowing different wagon types to be assembled into trains. For tracking and identification purposes, goods wagons are generally assigned a unique identifier, typically a UIC wagon number, or in North America, a company reporting mark plus a company specific serial number.

At the beginning of the railway era, the vast majority of goods wagons were four-wheeled vehicles of simple construction. These were almost exclusively small covered wagons, open wagons with side-boards, and flat wagons with or without stakes. Over the course of time, an increasing number of specialised wagons were developed.

Special wagons for specific purposes or wagons with special features were already being introduced around 1850 by private companies. Amongst these were tank wagons and numerous refrigerated vans. In countries like Germany, wagon hire firms procured large numbers of these wagons and hired them to the end users.

In the early days of the railway, goods trains still ran at top speeds of only about 20 mph (32 km/h). However, the introduction of through brakes using air pipes (such as the Kunze-Knorr brakes in Germany) from the 1920s enabled higher speeds to be safely achieved. Modern goods wagons are authorised for speeds up to around 75 mph (121 km/h) and in certain countries, wagons are increasingly equipped with GPS receivers and transponders which provide location monitoring as required. The Deutsche Bahn (DB) even has goods wagons cleared for high-speed rail travel at up to 100 mph (160 km/h). Because the braking distance of fast goods trains is longer than the separation between distant and home signals (as are Express Passenger trains), they may only run at high speeds of 150 mph (240 km/h) with locos on routes with early signalling systems in the driver’s cab (LZB, FZB and ETCS).

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