Twenty five of these wagons were built between 1973 and 1975. The number group was 1 to 25.
They were designed to carry over-height containers for car parts traffic betwen Melbourne and Sydney/Adelaide.
The vehicles featured bogies with small diameter wheels, a depressed container deck with a 'gooseneck' coupler to match the difference between the low draft gear location and the standard coupler height. The vehicles were 85' long; very long for this system which basically ran wagons of 50' - 65' in length.
To overcome safety issues raised because of the overhang around tight curves in the Melbourne shunting (switching) area, the wagons were coupled into blocks of five units.
Most of the vehicles were built and remained in storage for up to two years. Most entered service by about the middle of 1976.
In 1977/1978, the class letters were altered to indicate the special bogie type. Other state systems had already introduced these same type wagons with a 'W' suffix letter.
The 'W' was to indicate "Low Level Aligned Bogies able to be bogie exchanged within the 'W' group only".
In the 1979 recoding the class was relettered to VQDW.
Between 1983 and 1986 another fifty vehicles were built and placed into service. These were numbers 26 - 75.
In the late 1980's, a large block of these vehicles were leased to the NSW railway where they were used in traffic. Whilst in this traffic they were given the NSW equivalent coding and new numbers.
In the mid 1990's with the NRC starting up, the VQDW wagons were placed into NRC traffic as RQDW. Some, if not all, of the wagons leased to NSW were recoded directly from the applied NSW lettering to RQDW.