The record
Rover's early Rail Rover trial replaced the road wheels with flanged railway wheels and was abandoned, but the road-rail idea came back in a better form: retractable flanged guide wheels lowered hydraulically at each end of a standard vehicle, which steer it along the track while the road tyres provide drive and braking on the railhead. Land Rovers so equipped became a familiar sight with railway engineering departments for inspecting track, shunting light loads and carrying staff and tools to worksites, and the conversion was later produced commercially by Harsco Track Technologies. The archive photograph shows an Allied road-rail plant-hire Defender pickup in white with its yellow guide-wheel units and a yellow aerial work platform on the load bed, its boom folded over the cab and the basket at the rear, for overhead-line and structure inspection from the track.
The registry's model is a white Defender single-cab pickup with the guide-wheel units front and rear, and the platform's subframe, outriggers, pedestal, turret, two-section boom, rams and basket in yellow, with Allied lettering.
