Following on from the previous post about the toy cars, we are going to be looking at another pairing of cars; specifically Coastguard Land Rovers.
Starting off with the Corgi Classics 50 Years of Land Rover, Series IIA Station Wagon in navy blue with a yellow roof. The car also has searchlights and a siren on the roof and of course the spare wheel on the bonnet. Written across the side is HM Coastguard and Marine Rescue.
Once again I had trouble finding this specific model in the internet’s archives, however I did manage to find a Series III in a very similar livery. The similarities between the design of the two cars makes me confident that at some point, somewhere this Series IIA was roaming the beaches of the UK saving lives.
I can imagine that the offroad capabilities would be very useful when traversing beaches and rocks to find stranded or injured people.
The second model car is not so great a story as this one I believe to be completely fictitious for a number of reasons. Firstly, being the livery. I could not find one single example of any UK coastguard vehicle looking anywhere near this. Then it got me thinking, this one doesn’t say HM Coastguard, so perhaps it is not English. I looked at the design and searched European countries with coastlines and then also the USA as I feel the more cartoon like text and logo might be more in line with the Americans, however no luck again. I then scrapped the idea of another country because I noticed it was right hand drive, so the conclusion I came to is that someone at Corgi wanted to design a Coastguard car, chose a vehicle that is in line with the accurate vehicles and then created a unique design based off of the designs already in place.
Whilst one of these cars might not be a legitimate Coastguard vehicle, it once again goes to show how the versatility of Land Rovers have been used in a positive and life altering way. To think that since researching these cars, we have seen the mail being delivered by Land Rovers, gas and electric brought to people’s homes by Land Rover, law and order being kept in Land Rovers and now the beaches and coastlines kept safe by Land Rover’s. It is amazing how much one company have helped shape the history of a country.