Duck and the Diesel Engine (1958)

The rivalry between the two characters at the heart of this book encapsulated the contest between competing versions of the British railway system’s present and future.

John T. Kenney’s illustration of Duck (right) laughing as Diesel tries and fails to pull trucks out of a siding in ‘Pop Goes the Diesel’, from the Rev. W. Awdry’s Duck and the Diesel Engine (Edmund Ward).

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This post is part of the ‘Rewound’ series of analyses of objects or episodes from cultural and political history.