Every day’s a school day. Following yesterday’s post featuring a vehicle by a successful German truck manufacturer that we’d never heard of, here’s another.

This is an Industrieverband Fahrzeugbau W 50, or ‘IFA W50’ for short, which is what we shall definitely be calling it. Constructed in East Germany from 1965 to 1990, the IFA W 50 was titled simply after the conglomerate that ran all of the East German vehicle manufactures at the time, including Trabant, Wartburg, and a host of other rubbish Communist companies, plus a few designs pinched from West German DKW.

Like many manufacturers behind the Iron Curtain the W 50 was produced in huge numbers, partly because it was built for so long, and partly because, well… you couldn’t buy much else.

Almost 600,000 IFA W 50s were built during its 25 year production run across over sixty body varieties, with up to 80% exported throughout the Soviet Union and sympathetic countries in some years, until Germany reunified and the Union began to collapse, abruptly ending production in 1990.

This neat Lego recreation of the East German truck comes from Clemens Schneider (aka popider) of Flickr and it features a working tipper and a rather accurate drivetrain too. Head to Clemens’ ‘IFA W 50’ album via the link to see all the images.