That, of course, is where the lure for Mattel lies. And so the number of similar-coloured-but-slightly-differently-proportioned engines begins to puff uncontrollably towards infinity. Such questions of existential enginism are never answered, because by this stage in the series, the Rev was more interested in nerding out over various heritage railways and attempting to preserve them in fiction than he was in maintaining a consistent fictional world of developing characters. Is he dead? Does he suffer? Could he be recombined – and if he was, would he feel the thirst for vengeance against those who tried to murder him? The climactic frame of that story, with a wincing truck-face lying splintered on the ground, is one of the most disturbing in children's literature. Having caused intolerable levels of confusion and delay, the offending blue-collar worker is coupled (see how much I've learnt about railway management from these terrible bedtimes?) between two engines pulling in opposite directions and yanked until he flies apart.
But in terms of class warfare, Bulgy's doom has nothing on what's done to the truculent Troublesome Truck who refuses to learn his place during one of the later stories. That's what you get for being a blow-hard socialist. Sodor experiences its own miniature version of the cold war with the arrival of Bulgy, a red (yes, red, just like a Soviet) double-decker bus who cries "Free the roads!" and anticipates the revolutionary overthrow of rail transport.īulgy gets trapped under a bridge, painted green and converted into a henhouse. Sleep tight!"Īnd it's not just Henry who receives the Reverend's fossil-fuelled justice. And then you turn to your hopeful youngster and say: "That's the end. There are few more chilling parental moments than looking on that last page, with Henry's imploring eyes peeping out over the wall that the Fat Controller (to all attachment-anxiety-invoking intents and purposes, Henry's own father) has erected in order to teach the poor engine that trying to stay dry is a wicked, wicked business.
BEST TINY RAILS ENGINE SERIES
The very first book in the Railway Series includes The Sad Story of Henry – in which a sentient engine is immured in a tunnel as punishment for being a tiny bit vain about keeping his paint job out of the rain. In the Railway Series, mechanical whimsy (Look! A steam train! With a face!) is balanced by a taste for punishment that is both brutal and peremptory. And they love him, despite the fact that his stories are the crazed authoritarian fantasies of a father figure who would make the sternest Freudian blanch. They love him, even though the island of Sodor belongs to a far-off postwar world where things like "coal" and "steam" and "public transport" – unimaginable to the modern child-brain – were still comprehensible concepts. They love him so much that Barbie-hawker Mattel has bought the entire stable of Hit Entertainment, apparently mostly in order to get their corporate fingers on the Rev W Awdry's coal-powered progeny. Tricky word? It's probably "coupling", or maybe "gauge". And it lasts until exactly the day your children discover Thomas the Tank Engine, at which point you start developing mysterious headaches come bedtime and, Oh darling, I know you're only three, but you can probably work this one out yourself from the pictures while I lie on the floor with the duvet over my face. R eading to your children is one of the great joys of parenthood.
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