A Post Office Recovery Land Rover — a Series IIA 88-inch hard top of 1969–70, XAH 758H, in the Post Office's red with gold and yellow, POST OFFICE RECOVERY lettered along the roof edge and a yellow beacon on the roof: the breakdown vehicle that fetched the Post Office's own vans home.
BASE VEHICLESeries II 88″BUILT BYLand RoverIN SERVICE1969–70OPERATED INUnited KingdomPRODUCTIONUnknownLAYOUT4 wheels · 88″
The record
The Post Office ran the largest vehicle fleet in Britain, and a fleet that size needs its own breakdown service. The recovery Land Rovers were the light end of it: a short-wheelbase hard top that could reach a stranded mail van or telephone engineer's vehicle on any road and tow it back to the depot, marked so that nobody mistook it for a delivery van.
The documented vehicle is XAH 758H, a Series IIA 88-inch hard top registered in 1969–70, in the corporate red with gold and yellow, POST OFFICE RECOVERY printed in white along the roof edge, a yellow beacon in the centre of the roof and red interior seating with black fittings. It is known through the 1:43 and 1:76 models Oxford Diecast produced of it, sold by the Postal Museum among others; the museum's retail listing is the reference this registry's model was built from, and no photograph of the full-size vehicle, nor the conversion builder or the depot it served, has been found in the sources consulted. A late Series IIA 88 of this date carried the 2.25-litre four in petrol or diesel form — the Post Office specified diesel as standard for its engineering Land Rovers, but which this recovery vehicle had is not recorded.
Research status: draft — identification, dates or figures could not all be pinned down; the summary says what is unresolved.
Catalogue fields describe the vehicle's structure and body as this registry records it. They are not certified factory measurements, and no performance figures are published here.
Variants & colours
Factory colours
Post Office Red
Codes on hover. Hex values are representative approximations of period paint unless a source states a measured value.
Imagery
No published image yetA rendering impression or a free-licence photograph will appear here once one is published — the sources below link to photographs elsewhere
Where it was
GB United Kingdom1970–1985 · Post Office breakdown recovery, XAH 758H
BuiltLand Rover, Lode Lane, SolihullUnited Kingdom · 1969–197052.43, -1.78
