Thomas



Thomas is a tank engine created by the Reverend W. Awdry in the Railway Series books.

His debut appearance was in "Thomas the Tank Engine", published in 1947. He is considered to be the most widely-known fictional locomotive in the world.

When he first appeared, he was a station pilot that shunted coaches and trucks for the bigger engines. He longed for more important jobs, such as pulling the Express, but his inexperience prevented this. He was switched to Edward's station after an incident with some trucks, and eventually rescued James after his wooden brake blocks prevented him from stopping, and the Fat Controller (then known as the Fat Director) decided that he was ready for his own branch line, running from Tidmouth to Ffarquhar. He has remained in charge of this line ever since.

His closest friends are his coaches Annie and Clarabel. He is also good friends with Percy, (despite a lot of arguments), Toby, Duck, his old friend and mentor Edward.

In the Railway Series, he has generally been depicted with a cheeky and even self-important personality. He believes that he should be more respected by the others, and gets annoyed when he does not receive this respect. Luckily, Percy and Toby are more than capable of standing up to him, and Annie and Clarabel often rebuke him.

He is aware of his fame in the real world, and following a visit to the National Railway Museum at York he became an honourary member of the National Collection, joining such legendary locomotives as the LNER Class A4 4468 Mallard, the GWR 3700 Class 3440 City of Truro and Stephenson's Rocket

The Thomas of the early stories looks a little different from the one shown in later ones. Following the events of the story "Thomas Comes to Breakfast", in which Thomas crashed into the Ffarquhar stationmaster's house, his front end was rebuilt without the dip in his footplate. He has kept this ever since, except in Christopher Awdry's first Railway Series book, "Really Useful Engines".

Thomas has been the source of some friction between Christopher Awdry and his publishers, who repeatedly asked for more books centred around the character. Although Thomas was the most popular character in the books, both the Rev. W. and Christopher Awdry had always treated the characters in the books as an ensemble, and so before the television series was released there had only been two books named after Thomas ("Thomas the Tank Engine" and "Tank Engine Thomas Again"). After the debut of the television series, there were six more ("More About Thomas the Tank Engine", "Thomas and the Twins", "Thomas and the Great Railway Show", "Thomas Comes Home", "Thomas and the Fat Controller's Engines" and "Thomas and Victoria"). Some of these have little relation with Thomas: "Thomas and the Fat Controller's Engines" (the fifteith anniversary volume, originally to be called "The Fat Controller's Engines") features only one story out of the four centred on Thomas, "Rabbits"; while in "Thomas Comes Home", Thomas appears only on the last page, with the rest of the book dealing with Daisy, Toby and Percy while he was away at York.

Behind the scenes
When the Reverend W. Awdry created Thomas, he existed only as a push-along wooden toy made for his son Christopher. This engine looked rather different from the character in the books and television series, and carried the letters "NW" on its side tanks. Awdry claimed that this stood for "No Where", but later works would identify the railway Thomas and his friends worked on as the North Western Railway.

Awdry wrote four stories about Thomas, which were collected into a book called "Thomas the Tank Engine". For this, the publisher hired an illustrator named Reginald Payne. Payne decided to base his version of Thomas on a real locomotive, an LB&SCR E2 Class of the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway. Awdry was initially annoyed that, in the book, Thomas differed substantially from his original concept, but was satisfied when Payne explained that he was drawn after a real prototype, and in later books Awdry based all his characters on real locomotive classes.

One detail of Thomas' design bothered Awdry - his front bufferbeam featured a downward slope, which meant that his back bufferbeam was higher. This was an illustrator's mistake that was perpetuated in ater volumes; the accident in "Thomas Comes to Breakfast" was partly devised to rectify this.

Unfortunately, despite creating the visual image of such an iconic character, Payne did not receive any credit for his work, and it is only since the publication of Brian Sibley's "The Thomas the Tank Engine Man" that he has started to receive major recognition. Previously, it had often been assumed that C. Reginald Dalby, responsible for illustrating the books from "James the Red Engine" to "Percy the Small Engine" and repainting "The Three Railway Engines", was the character's first illustrator.