Shorland S55 British 4x4 Armored Personnel Carrier (APC)

The Shorland S55 is an armored 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 Defense Regiment in 1970. The Royal Ulster Constabulary soon replaced the Shorland with an armored 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 armored Land Rover. Shorts and Harland continued to develop the original Shorland from an armored patrol car with a crew of three to an armored 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.