The record
Scottorn Trailers Limited built the Bushmaster in the 1960s: a trailer with its own driven axle. A power take-off on the back of the Land Rover's transfer box turned a propeller shaft to a differential on the trailer axle, so the trailer pushed as well as followed and the outfit became, in effect, an articulated six-wheel drive carrying a 1,500 lb load over ground that would have bogged a towed trailer. Scottorn, like its rival Rubery Owen, sold the idea for cargo, generators, tanks, welders and compressors; how many were built is not known, and the company is long gone.
The photograph the queue supplied shows one application: a fire-fighting outfit, with the trailer carrying a water tank and the Land Rover a pump. The Land Rover is a Series IIA 109 cut down to a bare tender — no doors, no roof, just the windscreen — with the pump set and its hose reel across the back of the tub, extinguisher bottles, suction hoses hooked along the sides, a rear-facing bench seat for the crew and a beacon on a pole. Per the queue's instructions the vehicle is modelled alone in deep bronze green with an orange beacon, and the powered trailer is left out. The operator, date and registration of the photographed outfit are not given in the source; the photograph is black and white, so the colour is the one requested rather than one recorded.
