Troublesome Engines (1950)
The Rev. W. Awdry’s Troublesome Engines centred on a Christianised notion of moral economy, in which industrial action was pitted against unitary righteous authority.
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This post is part of the ‘Rewound’ series of analyses of objects or episodes from cultural and political history. It is available in full only to paid subscribers.
This is the first in what will be an occasional miniseries of posts on The Railway Series: the original 26 books written by the Revered Wilbert Vere Awdry and published between 1945 and 1972. These later became the source material for the lucrative Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends franchise (named after the most popular of Awdry’s engines), starting with Britt Allcroft’s adaptation of the books for television from 1984.
Yet my interest here is in the fictional universe the Reverend Awdry created in the first instance, which eventually evolved, as the series progressed, into the interconnected rail networks of the invented Island of Sodor. How did his theological beliefs, as an Anglican clergyman, infuse this world of living, talking engines, in its moral foundations and political implications? How did he, as a railway enthusiast, imagine the operation of the industry in these books, in response to real-life organisational and technological changes such as nationalisation and dieselisation? Where do the books fit in within the wider culture of post-war Britain?
It’s a fictional universe that is incredibly familiar to me. As far back as I can remember, there was Thomas, firstly the programme (specifically the original two series, narrated by Ringo Starr), and as I learned to read, Awdry’s books (and the subsequent additions to the series written by his son Christopher from 1983 onwards). It’s a comforting world virtually inseparable from my embryonic childhood one. It’s also a world, etched in detail in my memory as it is, that I’ve always been eager to reflect and write critically on, as a scholar of the intersection between popular culture and political ideology.
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So we begin this miniseries with the book that perhaps remained with me the most, and in one way the most explicitly political: Troublesome Engines.
Troublesome Engines
Troublesome Engines was published in 1950. It was the fifth book in the series that had been published by Leicester-based Edmund Ward since 1945, with increasing commercial success. In line with its predecessors, it contained four stories (illustrated by C. Reginald Dalby) that followed an overarching narrative arc.
It centred on the principal cast of characters introduced in the previous four books: cheeky but maturing Thomas (hitherto the only tank engine) and his coaches, Annie and Clarabel; kindly Edward; self-pitying Henry; boastful Gordon; vain James; and the railway’s strict but benevolent ‘Fat Controller’. It also introduced another, enthusiastic new tank engine, Percy.
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The book began with an explanatory foreword by Awdry:
Dear Friends,
News from the Main Line has not been good. The Fat Controller has been having trouble. A short while ago, he gave Henry a coat of green paint, but as soon as he got his old colour back again, Henry became conceited. Gordon and James, too, have been getting above themselves.
I am glad to say, however, that the Fat Controller has, quite kindly but very firmly, put them in their place. And now the trains are running as usual.
I hope you will like meeting Percy. We shall be hearing more of him later.1
The first story in Troublesome Engines is ‘Henry and the Elephant’. In the wake of Thomas having left the Main Line to work on his own branch line, the additional work leads to Henry, Gordon, and James becoming disgruntled. Temporary distraction from their troubles comes with the arrival of a circus in the town. Yet thereafter, when Henry pulls a train to deal with a blockage in a tunnel, it turns out that the blockage is an elephant, which splashes him with water.
In the second story, ‘Tenders and Turntables’, it is the turn of Gordon and James to endure embarrassment. Firstly, after Gordon stubbornly makes it impossible to turn him around on a turntable, he is forced to pull a train backwards, and is mistaken for a tank engine. Then the much lighter James is spun around uncontrollably by the wind on the same turntable. They and Henry end the story determined to avenge their humiliations.
They subsequently go on strike in the third story, ‘Trouble in the Shed’, refusing to shunt their own coaches. The Fat Controllers asks Edward to fetch the coaches for them so that their trains can run, but they ostracise him for shunting when he is a tender engine. The Fat Controller decides he needs to buy another tank engine, and at the engine workshop is impressed by Percy, who he brings back to work on the railway. Percy makes an immediately positive impact, and the Fat Controller decides to teach Henry, Gordon, and James a lesson by shutting them up in the shed, bringing Thomas back to help Edward run all the Main Line trains, while Percy helped run Thomas’s branch line.
The fourth story, ‘Percy runs away’, concludes this narrative arc. Henry, Gordon, and James, suitably chastened, are let back out of the shed to operate the main line as normal. Percy is cheeky towards them, but forgetting Edward’s advice to whistle to let the signalman know he is there, suddenly finds Gordon rushing directly towards him with the Express. Gordon stops in time and avoids a collision, but Percy – his driver and fireman having leapt from his footplate – speeds away backwards along the line and cannot stop until he is directed into a siding with a sandbank. Gordon arrives and the two reconcile. The story, and book, concludes by informing the reader that Percy remains cheeky but has learned to be more cautious.
Awdry wrote Troublesome Engines while working as Rector in the Cambridgeshire parish of Elsworth, a position he had occupied since 1946. He had by this time developed a working system for producing the Railway Series books at a rate of roughly one per year while also fulfilling the duties of his day job. He wove novelty into the familiar format by drawing upon real-life stories from railways: ‘Henry and the Elephant’, for example, was based on real story he heard from a former worker on the Indian railways.2
The theme of a strike, meanwhile, likely drew upon the recent instances of industrial unrest, including unofficial stoppages, on the nationalised British Railways, due to rail workers’ dissatisfaction with having to lodge away from home on longer journeys, and over pay.3
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