The record
The Danish Army bought the Series III Land Rover in quantity after its October 1971 introduction, and had it bodied by outside contractors in a long list of specialist forms — radio relay, teletype van, ambulance, bus, station car, pick-up, mortar fire direction centre. This one carries a shelter body fitted with a Sylvania automatic telephone exchange: a mobile switchboard that could be driven to a headquarters or signals node and patched into field telephone lines, so that a formation's command posts could talk to each other without waiting for a permanent exchange to be built. The shelter is heated by an Eberspächer D4L heater for the operators inside.
The documented vehicle, 51.258, was photographed by Henrik Clausen in Copenhagen and is recorded by the Danish Army Vehicles Homepage with the type's figures: 4.56 m long, 1.63 m wide and 2.41 m high with the shelter, 2,700 kg, the 2,286 cc four-cylinder diesel of 59 hp, a four-speed gearbox with two-speed transfer case, 12/24-volt electrics, 90 litres of fuel for 350 km, a crew of two and a prepared fording depth of 0.7 m. Its camouflage is the Danish three-colour scheme applied to the army's vehicles from the 1980s: an olive-green base with large black and lighter green blotches over cab, bonnet and shelter alike, the registration stencilled on the wings and carried on a black plate at the front, and the small red-and-white Dannebrog emblem on the right wing. Who built the shelter, and how many exchange vehicles the army fielded, are not stated in the source.
