Shorland armoured car


The Shorland is an armoured patrol car that was designed specifically for the Royal Ulster Constabulary by Frederick Butler. The first design meeting took place in November 1961. The third and final prototype was completed in 1964 and the first RUC Shorlands were delivered in 1966. They were reallocated to the Ulster Defence Regiment in 1970. The Royal Ulster Constabulary soon replaced the Shorland with an armoured Land Rover with more conventional profile and no machine gun turret.
The vehicles were built by Short Brothers and Harland of Belfast using the chassis from the Series IIA Land Rover.
By the nineties, the Land Rover Tangi, designed and built by the Royal Ulster Constabulary's own vehicle engineering team, was by far the most common model of armoured Land Rover.
Shorts and Harland continued to develop the original Shorland from an armoured patrol car with a crew of three to an armoured personnel vehicle, capable of carrying two up front and six in the rear; a small number of these were used on the streets in Northern Ireland as late as 1998.
In 1996, the Short Brothers sold the complete Shorland design to British Aerospace Australia.
They were also used by the RAF Police in Germany in the 1990s for Special Weapons escort duties.

Design

The Shorland is a long wheelbase Land Rover with the turret similar in appearance to that of a Mk 2 Ferret scout car. The vehicle has upgraded suspension to deal with the extra weight of the armour.

Variants

Mk 1