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Military workshop, Converter · British garrisons across West Germany; BAOR headquarters at Bad Oeynhausen, from 1954 JHQ Rheindahlen · from 1945

British Army (BAOR) Workshops

Not a company but the British Army's own repair organisation in West Germany: the REME field, station and base workshops of the British Army of the Rhine, which maintained the largest overseas British force of the Cold War. Workshops in Germany also rebuilt a handful of Series IIA 88s as black ceremonial and VIP-security vehicles for royal visits in the 1970s and 1980s.

History

The second British Army of the Rhine was formed on 25 August 1945 from the British Liberation Army, with headquarters first at Bad Oeynhausen and from October 1954 at JHQ Rheindahlen. It became NATO's Northern Army Group commitment on the North German Plain and was the largest overseas deployment of British troops — around 55,000 to 80,000 soldiers through the Cold War decades, still some 50,000 in 1984. Keeping that force's vehicles and equipment running fell to the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, whose field, station and base workshops were distributed across the British garrison towns; individual units came and went with successive reorganisations, from area and station workshops in the occupation years to the armoured and field workshops that supported 1 (BR) Corps. The Options for Change cuts announced in 1993 reduced BAOR sharply, and in 1994 it was reconstituted as British Forces Germany; the last British base in Germany was handed over in February 2020.

Alongside routine repair, BAOR workshops built the small number of parade vehicles the command needed. The Dunsfold Collection's 1968 Series IIA 88 (chassis 24433053D, registration 30 XC 27) was issued to BAOR and rebuilt by army workshops in Germany as a black-painted ceremonial and security vehicle, fitted for radio and equipped to carry security personnel; at least three such conversions were made, and they used Volkswagen Beetle hubcaps and mirrors bought from the local economy. The vehicles were used during visits by The Queen and the Queen Mother in the 1970s and 1980s and were demobbed in 1993 with only about 4,000 km on the clock.

No published source traced during this research names the individual REME workshop or garrison that carried out the ceremonial conversions — the Dunsfold record says only 'army workshops in Germany' — so this entry stands for the BAOR workshop system collectively rather than for an identified unit.

Vehicles in this registry (1)

Sources & citations

Maker record updated 2026-09-10T05:40:28.275Z · status: draft