Thomas and…

What a load of tosh that Thomas and Friends lark is on the TV, I grew up reading the books don’tcha know, nothing wrong with reading the books. At least in the books Annie and Clarabel were proper bogie coaches and not the four-wheeler miscreations depicted by Britt Allcroft and Co. on the telly box.

I thought I’d give it a go though, telly-Thomas, in the interests of fairness, but I couldn’t get on with it. I’d be sitting there shouting; ‘That wouldn’t happen in real life!” and, “Loose coupled stock on the main line without a brake van?” and so on.

The old Reverend Awdry you know, he strove to keep things prototypical, oh, yes, he was quite a stickler for things being prototypical in his stories and fell-out with the book illustrator once because the things he was painting weren’t ‘just so’.

Interestingly enough, the (fictional, sorry…) Isle of Sodor, whereon Thomas and his friends live and work, was named after the Diocese of Sodor and Man which today covers the Isle of Man and adjacent islets but historically was a huge undertaking covering Man, the Hebrides and other islands along the west coast of Scotland. Norwegian in origin, its original name was Suðreyjar – Southern Isles, this was to differentiate between the Norðreyjar or Northern Isles of Orkney and Shetland. Not that they had railways back then, but if they had, I’m pretty sure that Annie and Clarabel would have been proper bogie coaches.