Thomas the Tank Engine (1946)
The second book in The Railway Series introduced its most iconic character, whose childlike qualities appealed to a young audience even as they routinely resulted in chastening experiences.
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This post is part of the newsletter’s ‘Rewound’ series of analyses of objects or episodes from cultural and political history.
Content warning: Death.
Published in 1946, Thomas the Tank Engine followed on from author Reverend Wilbert Awdry’s debut children’s book, The Three Railway Engines, about anthropomorphised engines Edward, Gordon, and Henry, which had come out a year earlier with the small Leicester-based publisher Edmund Ward. The surprise success of the book, which, despite poor quality illustrations by William Middleton, sold well across three runs, prompted the publisher to commission Awdry to write a second book within the same imagined domain and with the same four-story compendium format, this time for a £45 fee (more than twice what he had received for the first volume). Its eponymous hero, based on a 0-6-0 model tank engine Awdry had built for his young son Christopher, would become the nascent Railway Series’ most iconic ambassador.1
Thomas the Tank Engine begins with ‘Thomas and Gordon’, which introduces the character of Thomas, a tank engine who works at a main line station, fetching the larger engines’ trains. When he deliberately surprises a resting Gordon – whose sense of self-importance had been established in the first book – the big engine decides to get his revenge by pulling out of the station with his train before Thomas can be decoupled, and speeding along the line with the little engine unwillingly in tow, leaving Thomas exhausted and humiliated.
In ‘Thomas’s Train’, the little engine is eager for the opportunity to pull a passenger train himself, rather than simply to shunt coaches for the other engines. His chance arrives when he is required to stand in for an absent Henry. However, Thomas pulls out of the station before the coaches can be coupled to him and leaves without them, only belatedly realising, and having to return for them, again suitably embarrassed.
Another opportunity presents itself in ‘Thomas and the Trucks’, when kindly Edward takes pity on Thomas and offers to let him pull his goods train. Again, Thomas’s impetuosity gets the better of him, and he overconfidently antagonises the trucks, who decide to get their own back by suddenly pushing him down a hill. A frightened Thomas is propelled into the station, where he eventually stops just short of the buffers, under the disapproving gaze of the railway’s ‘fat director’, who tells Thomas he has much to learn.
The book ends with ‘Thomas and the Breakdown Train’. Thomas is now determined to take heed from his previous mishaps and really prove himself through careful and hard work. One day he sees a new tender engine, James, being pushed recklessly along by his train of trucks. James is derailed as a result, and Thomas purposefully takes the special ‘breakdown train’ to rescue the stricken engine. Having fully demonstrated his worth, the Fat Director rewards Thomas with his own branch line, complete with his own two coaches.
A childlike protagonist
DEAR CHRISTOPHER,
Here is your friend Thomas the Tank Engine. He wanted to come out of his station-yard and see the world. These stories tell you how he did it.
I hope you will like them because you helped me to make them.YOUR LOVING DADDY.2
This opening dedication nodded to Christopher Awdry’s importance as the original intended audience for his father’s stories, before he had even considered writing them down (due to Christopher’s demand on their precise repetition), let alone publishing them.3 It also set a paradigm for how the author would open his third book in the series, 1948’s James the Red Engine, save with his foreword now directed at the more general reader: ‘DEAR FRIENDS OF EDWARD, GORDON, HENRY AND THOMAS’; thereafter, simply ‘DEAR FRIENDS’ from his fourth book onwards.4 This manner of authorial address adopted the style of a confidant providing an update on near-contemporaneous developments in a familiar world. In Thomas the Tank Engine, however, the association of one engine with one child (whose specially made model engine he was based upon) established Thomas as especially childlike.
‘Thomas and Gordon’ introduced Thomas as a ‘fussy little engine’, and as a ‘cheeky little engine too’, who ‘thought no engine worked as hard as him’, hence his predilection for playing tricks on them.5 These qualities of naïve egocentrism – his status as protagonist in this book and world indicated by the presence of a number ‘1’ on his side – and appetite for mild transgression towards those larger than him are ones an adult would readily recognise in a child.6 They also, along with Thomas’s omnipresence established him as a ready object for the child reader’s (or listener’s) identification.
Yet, continuing the previous book’s theme of pride coming before the fall, Thomas’s behaviour has consequences, with Gordon leveraging his own position, experience, and strength to ‘pay Thomas out’.7 Public ridicule by a human crowd of onlookers reinforces the disciplinary function of Gordon’s act of revenge, as does Gordon’s own rejoinder: ‘“Well, little Thomas,” chuckled Gordon as he passed, “now you know what hard work means, don’t you?”’8 Thomas, we are told, ‘was careful afterwards never to be cheeky to Gordon again’.9
The next story, however, makes evident another related facet of Thomas’s personality: a desire to attain responsibility without possessing the necessary experience to do so. When presented with the opportunity to pull a passenger train, his enthusiasm gets the better of him:
“Don’t be impatient,” said his driver. “Wait till everything is ready.”
But Thomas was too excited to listen to a word he said.10
When he pulls out of the station without the coaches attached, Thomas misinterprets the commotion this causes out of his lack of humility, and overestimation of his nascent knowledge base.
“They’re waving because I’m such a splendid engine,” he thought importantly. “Henry says it’s hard to pull trains, but I think it’s easy.
“Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!” he puffed, pretending to be like Gordon.”11
When Thomas realises his mistake, he is able to rectify it; his remorse brings forgiveness, and an opportunity for redemption, but cannot stave off another bout of ridicule from the same peers he foolishly belittled and mimicked:
At the station all the passengers were talking at once. They were telling the fat director, the stationmaster and the guard what a bad railway it was.
But when Thomas came back and they saw how sad he was, they couldn’t be cross. So they coupled him to the train, and this time he really pulled it.
But for a long time afterwards the other engines laughed at Thomas, and said:
“Look there’s Thomas, who wanted to pull a train, but forgot about the coaches!”12
Anthropomorphism, illustration, motion, and emotion
Thomas is not just childlike in personality; as a tank engine, he is physically equated to a child in his dimensions. The second sentence of ‘Thomas and Gordon’ describes him thus: ‘He had six small wheels, a short stumpy funnel, a short stumpy boiler, and a short stumpy dome.’13 It sits opposite a picture of Thomas from the side on, showing not only his compact frame, but also his youthful, smiling face. This was the first and only volume of the series to be illustrated by ex-naval draughtsman Reginald Payne; his subsequent illness and untimely death resulted in his being succeeded by C. Reginald Dalby, who despite Awdry’s displeasure with the technical inaccuracies in his drawings of engines, illustrated the next nine Railway Series books.14 Payne – like Dalby after him – simply and effectively captured engines’ emotions through their facial expressions, communicating unmistakably at different points in this book that Thomas is feeling cheeky, tired, sad, pleased, scared, chastened, or determined.
Thomas the Tank Engine also further developed the equation between mechanical and human bodily function. Take this passage from ‘Thomas and Gordon’, for example: ‘One morning Thomas wouldn’t wake up. His driver and fireman couldn’t make him start. His fire went out and there was not enough steam.’15 Similarly, in ‘Thomas’s Train’, Thomas’s opportunity to pull a train comes because ‘Henry was ill. The men worked hard, but he didn’t get any better.’ – equating mechanical failure with human sickness, and maintenance with medical care.16 The story also raised the question of where culpability lay for the mistake that led to Thomas’s coaches being left behind in the station, and thus blurs the line between the agency of the engines and the people who operate them:
What happened then no one knows. Perhaps they forgot to couple Thomas to the train; perhaps Thomas was too impatient to wait till they were ready; or perhaps his driver pulled the lever by mistake.17
‘Thomas and the Trucks’ goes further by granting the capacity to move autonomously to rolling stock as well, in a passage that also canonically roots the story in the events and spaces of the first book.
Thomas whistled “Peep! peep!” and they rushed through the tunnel in which Henry had been shut up.
Then they came to the top of the hill where Gordon had stuck.
“Steady now, steady,” warned the driver, and he shut off steam, and began to put on the brakes.
“We’re stopping, we’re stopping,” called Thomas.
“No! No! No! No!” answered the trucks, and bumped into each other. “Go — on! — go — on!” and before his driver could stop them, they had pushed Thomas down the hill, and were rattling and laughing behind him.”18
In the aforementioned instance of Gordon being stuck on a hill, he had claimed, it seemed somewhat preposterously, that the trucks were deliberately holding him back.19 Here, though, it becomes that the trucks do have the capacity, and the vindictiveness, to push an engine of their own accord.
This establishes what would become a recurring plot point of the Railway Series, and major source of suspense and excitement: the prospect, and sometimes event, of an accident. Accompanied by Payne’s illustrations, using motion lines and Thomas’s terrified facial expressions to evoke the severity of and drama in the situation, the story raises our anticipation of a collision until:
“Oo ————— ooh e ————— r,” groaned Thomas, as his brakes held fast and he skidded along the rails.
“I must stop,” and he shut his eyes tight.
When he opened them he saw he had stopped just in front of the buffers, and there watching him was —
The fat director!20
In ‘Thomas and the Breakdown Train’, we have the series’ first crash, although with the narrative centring on Thomas, the actual accident itself is external to the telling of the story; we are nonetheless presented with its aftermath, in text and image. Amid the chaos of derailed engine, overturned trucks, and spilled cargo, it is clear that the consequences are contained and remediable:
They found James and the truck at a bend in the line. The brake-van and the last few trucks were on the rails, but the front ones were piled in a heap; James was in a field with a cow looking at him, and his driver and fireman were feeling him all over to see if he was hurt.21
Accidents in The Railway Series nearly always involved engines pulling goods trains (if attached to any train at all) rather than coaches filled with passengers who might be hurt. Derailed engines are never seriously damaged beyond what a trip to the works can repair, and rail crew always escape injury. Given the actual frequency of fatal accidents on Britain’s railways at the time, this was something of a sanitised presentation. It also meant that children who, like Thomas, had a rather embryonic sense of the world around them, could vicariously experience moments of danger through a repetitively secure set of generic conventions, in which death itself is always excluded as a real possibility.
Maturity, value, and progression
“What are you doing here, Thomas?” [the fat director] asked sternly.
“I’ve brought Edward’s trucks,” Thomas answered.
“Why did you come so fast?”
“I didn’t mean to, I was pushed,” said Thomas sadly.
“Haven’t you pulled trucks before?”
“No.”
“Then you’ve a lot to learn about trucks, little Thomas. They are silly things and must be kept in their place. After pushing them about here for a few weeks you’ll know almost as much about them as Edward. Then you’ll be a Really Useful Engine.”22
This concluding passage of ‘Thomas and the Trucks’ marked the debut appearance in the Railway Series of the phrase ‘Really Useful Engine’, each word initially capitalised to establish its definitiveness as a category. It originates with the ‘fat director’, but is internalised by the engines themselves, becoming something of a mantra throughout subsequent books. This encounter also marks something of a watershed moment for Thomas. In each of the first three stories in the volume, his inexperience has been humiliatingly laid bare, but until this point without any alteration in his behaviour, instead commencing the next story with a similar show of impatience and naivety. The first page of ‘Thomas and the Breakdown Train’, however, makes clear that something has changed, and a maturing process is now underway:
[Thomas] worked hard — he knew now that has wasn’t so clever as he had thought. Besides, the fat director had been kind to him and he wanted to learn all about trucks so as to be a Really Useful Engine.23
Expressing humility, and recognising both the greater wisdom and benevolence of a father-like figure, Thomas now accepts the director’s ambition for him as his own, expressing it in the same terms. Following James’s accident, Thomas is tasked with taking the breakdown train to the scene of the derailment, demonstrating his earned readiness for responsibility. He is no longer mimicking adultlike behaviour, but actively undertaking it:
Thomas worked his hardest. “Hurry! Hurry! Hurry! he puffed, and this time he wasn’t pretending to be like Gordon, he really meant it.24
After Thomas has helped rescue James, the fat director confirms that “You’re a Really Useful Engine.”, granting him his own branch line by way of reward.25 On the final page, we are told:
Now Thomas is as happy as can be. He has a branch line all to himself, and puffs proudly backwards and forwards with two coaches all day.26
However, the very popularity of Thomas as a character meant there were limits to the extent of this transformation. In 1949’s Tank Engine Thomas Again, for example, he:
is rude to Henry for being late (and subsequently rushes off without his train’s guard).
expresses a foolish desire to go fishing (and then ends up with fish in his boiler after it had to be refilled directly from a river).
mocks a tractor named Terrence for his caterpillar wheels and refuses to wear his snow plough (and subsequently gets stuck in a drift and requires Terrence to rescue him).
wins a race with a bus called Bertie, on this occasion his bravado being rewarded rather than punished (because it demonstrated the superiority of rail over roads).
Thomas, as the series progressed, enjoyed forms of responsibility equivalent to that of other engines, but also readily engaged in acts of one-upmanship. This is partly because the engines fulfil a disciplinary function vis-à-vis each other, punishing hubris by playing tricks of their own or delivering swift putdowns. Yet it is also partly because the pleasure of Thomas as a character lies in his perennial mischievousness, even when this routinely backfires. The moral world of The Railway Series is one in which time, effort, and obedience generate value, through the effective running of the railway, and also demonstrate the worth of the characters themselves. To be mature is to gain value, and simultaneously not overvalue oneself; to be childish is to lack value, and lack awareness of that lack. Yet paradoxically, being written for children, its greatest icon is that precisely because he moves indefinitely between those two poles, simultaneously inverting and affirming the hierarchy Awdry constructed.
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Otherwise, please show your appreciation by sharing this post more widely, and referring the newsletter to friends.
You might also enjoy these posts from the Academic Bubble archive:
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.
The Three Railway Engines (1945)
The first book in the Reverend Awdry’s Railway Series sketched out a world of living engines, existing in relation to humans and rolling stock, governed by a clearly Christian moral framework.
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.
See Brian Sibley, The Thomas the Tank Engine Man: The Story of the Reverend W. Awdry and His Really Useful Engines (London: Heinemann, 1995), Ch. 6.
Rev. W. Awdry, Thomas the Tank Engine (Leicester: Edmund Ward, 1946), p. 3.
Sibley, The Thomas the Tank Engine Man, Ch. 5.
Rev. W. Awdry, James the Red Engine (Leicester: Edmund Ward, 1948), p. 3; Rev. W. Awdry, Tank Engine Thomas Again (Leicester: Edmund Ward, 1949), p. 3.
Awdry, Thomas the Tank Engine, pp. 4, 6.
The other engines would not receive numbers until the sixth book in the series. Rev. W. Awdry, Henry the Green Engine (Leicester: Edmund Ward, 1951), p. 3.
Awdry, Thomas the Tank Engine, p. 8.
Ibid., p. 18.
Ibid., p. 18.
Ibid., p. 24.
Ibid., p. 26.
Ibid, p. 32.
Ibid., p. 4.
Sibley, The Thomas the Tank Engine Man, pp. 128–134, 145–147.
Awdry, Thomas the Tank Engine, p. 10.
Ibid, p. 20.
Ibid., p. 26.
Ibid., pp. 40, 42.
Rev. W. Awdry, The Three Railway Engines (Leicester: Edmund Ward, 1945), p. 24.
Awdry, Thomas the Tank Engine, p. 44.
Ibid., p. 56.
Ibid., p. 46.
Ibid., p. 48.
Ibid., p. 54.
Ibid., p. 60.
Ibid., p. 62.