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Converter, Engineering, Manufacturer, Equipment maker · Biggar, Lanarkshire, United Kingdom · 1936–present

James A. Cuthbertson Ltd

Agricultural and general engineers of Biggar, Lanarkshire, founded in 1936 and still trading, whose speciality has always been running gear and machinery for ground too soft to carry a wheel. Between 1958 and the 1960s the firm bolted Series Land Rovers onto four-bogie tracked subframes of its own design, building perhaps fifteen of the tracked Cuthbertsons.

History

James A. Cuthbertson began trading at Biggar, Lanarkshire in 1936, and was incorporated as James A. Cuthbertson Ltd in 1946. The founder, James Archibald Cuthbertson, was an agricultural engineer — the firm is described as such in 1937 directories, broadening to general engineering by 1946 — whose interest lay in machinery that could work wet peat, moss and hill ground. Early products included drainage and forestry planting ploughs, a bracken cutter, a grassland rejuvenator and a lime spreader, several of which took Highland Show silver medals between 1948 and 1950, and the company advertised itself in 1946 as a pioneer of mechanised draining. Its own account credits Cuthbertson with developing endless rubber-belt track and with wartime work on the PLUTO cross-Channel fuel pipeline.

Rubber track became the house speciality. Cuthbertson made half-track and trailer-track conversions for Fordson tractors in 1951-52, and from about 1951 built the Water Buffalo, a very heavy low-ground-pressure tracked tractor on a 75 hp Albion engine that the Forestry Commission and its contractors used for peat ploughing, drainage and recovering bogged machines into the early 1960s. Plant recovery from hillsides and peat bogs became a business in itself, and the firm also worked on underwater pipelines and on cable-laying along railways and motorways.

The tracked Land Rover followed in 1958 and is the vehicle the company is now best remembered for outside Scotland. Rather than modify the Land Rover, Cuthbertson built a girder subframe carrying four rubber-jointed track bogies and bolted a standard vehicle on top; the road wheels were replaced by driving sprockets, the front bogies steered on a track-rod linkage with engine-driven assistance, and ground pressure fell to roughly 1.9 lb/sq in. Conversions were done on Series I, II and III donors in both wheelbases for estates, utilities, telephone companies and the military, but the total was small — around fifteen, certainly fewer than twenty — and only a handful survive, among them the 1958 Series II 109 at the British Motor Museum, Gaydon.

James A. Cuthbertson Ltd is still in business at Biggar ninety years after it started, having settled on winter maintenance as its main trade: snowploughs, snowblowers and gritters for local authorities, ground support equipment for Glasgow and Edinburgh airports, and custom fabrication. The tracked vehicles are long out of production.

Imagery

A vehicle, not the works: a Series II Cuthbertson four-track conversion (right) beside a Roadless Forest Rover, the two best-known British soft-ground Land Rover specials.
A vehicle, not the works: a Series II Cuthbertson four-track conversion (right) beside a Roadless Forest Rover, the two best-known British soft-ground Land Rover specials. Kyle Gordon, via Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 2.0 ↗
Front track bogie of a Series II Cuthbertson, showing the sprocket drive and steering linkage that were the Biggar firm's own engineering.
Front track bogie of a Series II Cuthbertson, showing the sprocket drive and steering linkage that were the Biggar firm's own engineering. Kyle Gordon, via Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 2.0 ↗

Vehicles in this registry (1)

Sources & citations

Maker record updated 2026-09-10T05:17:07.278Z · status: researched