Post Office Recovery.

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.