The Victorian Railways in Australia have had a vast range of hopper-type wagons over the last century, for transporting various types of free-flowing dry goods including grains, fuel, and various powders.
Later designs experimented with pressurised drums to store various powdered goods, pumped into and out of the wagons using external high-pressure air supplies.
Later wagons were built to bring coal from Yallourn, which was mined to generate power at Newport for the Melbourne suburban electrified system.
The 12 wagons were imported as kits from the American Car and Foundry Co., delivered to Newport Workshops and assembled there then released to traffic over a seventeen-day period late in 1925.
The box contained two pairs of sloped sheets so that the cement powder was carried in two separate compartments; each of these fed a single hatch adjacent to the bogies.
[13] However, shortly after the class relettering had been completed it was found that the brakes fitted to the bogies were not powerful enough (against a loaded CJF) to qualify for the 'F' classification, thus from 1968 to 1972 most of the wagons were returned to their previous CJ codes.
[12] After the Kiewa Hydroelectric scheme was completed, the only traffic available for the class was from Fyansford to the Arden Street sidings in Melbourne; this was run as a block train.
In the statewide 1979 freight recodings, the wagons became known as VHCA (Victoria, Hopper, Cement, 70 km/h (43 mph) limit); the entire class, save for 9, 52 and 58, survived to have this new code applied.
Locomotives X32 and R707 were modified to take the fuel, which was prepared at special plants and railed to depots as required in a small fleet of seven CK-class wagons.
These vehicles were based on a standard four-wheel underframe, with two pressurised drums fitted for air discharge directly into the engine tenders.
At the time it was thought that a further fifteen X Class would be built or converted to run with PBC, justifying the extra expense, but the early diesel locomotives were more economic to operate on grounds of higher utilisation.
[24] In 1971-72, the fixed-wheel fleet was rendered obsolete, with the introduction of four-drum bogie flour wagons, and converted (back) to the J series for cement use.
Until the 1960s, unbagged grain traffic was handled with the GY fleet of open wagons, which could be filled from overhead chutes but needed to be shovelled out by hand.
[28] In the late 1970s, funding for the bogie grain wagon construction program was drying up, while demand for rolling stock with faster loading and unloading times was increasing.
Additionally the Victorian Railways had a long-held tradition of restoring and upgrading existing rolling stock, rather than purchasing new vehicles, because that allowed funding to be sourced from maintenance budgets rather than new allocations from the Government (regardless of whether that would provide a better long-term outcome).
GY2207 was modified in March 1979; the sides and ends were removed and a large hole cut into the floor between the axles, to make way for a new hopper unit on the existing underframe with under-floor hatches for unloading.
To resolve both issues later wagons were built with only two hatches, centred one either side which halved the grain delivery rate and made access to the brake rigging much easier.
Rather than using a steel fabricated rooftop, that wagon had a specially cast fibreglass shell constructed and attached, with the intent of reducing the tare weight low enough to avoid frame cracking.
Later conversions, all from the VPFX class, created the VPLX and VZGX varieties for carrying lime and specially dried locomotive sand respectively.
Traffic was from Fyansford cement plant (near Geelong) to Somerton in Melbourne's north, where Blue Circle had built a holding depot.
The initial order consisted of 100 aluminium and 100 steel-bodied wagons, GJX 1-100 and 101-200 respectively; the code indicated Grain, Hopper and Gauge Convertible respectively.
In response to this issue, nearly all the wagons were recoded from GJX to GJF in 1972, indicating that they were no longer suitable for gauge conversion but still able to travel at up to 50 mph (80 km/h).
Initially the classes were to be released to service with an X as the final letter, but this changed for a short time between 1977 and 1978 when the Victorian Railways chose to remove the gauge-conversion facilities from a large portion of its fleet.
Conversions between the classes happened fairly regularly, as the centre unit of each wagon was very similar if not identical; the changes were mainly to the roof, if any, the discharge mechanism, and the addition or removal of plates over the ends, shielding the brake equipment.
Briquettes, combustible "biscuits" made by compressing brown coal dust under extreme pressure, had been produced in the Latrobe Valley since the late 1920s, using technology acquired from Germany following World War I.
Until the late 1970s, normal transport of these bricks was by standard four-wheeled I and IA wagons, which by 1977 were being removed from service as obsolete, worn-out technology.
The change to JCF proved to be only temporary, as by 1978 the first fifteen had been converted back to JCX, probably to allow for interstate cement traffic such as the construction of Canberra's new Parliament House.
During late 2000, Freight Australia purchased a fleet of fifty ex-NSW NGMF hopper wagons from a scrap metal dealer in New South Wales.
The wagons were refurbished, repainted to green with "FREIGHT AUSTRALIA" logos on the sides and had broad gauge bogies fitted at the Bendigo North Workshops, and were reclassed VHBF 1101-1150.
However, in the preservation era Puffing Billy acquired a pair of ex-Tasmanian hopper wagons for use on ballast trains, and reclassed them as NNN.