Island Railways

“The island of Sodor is surrounded by beautiful blue sea…”

So begins the latest video release of Thomas The Tank Engine and Friends, which I had the dubious honour of subtitling today. Irritating theme tune aside, the one thing that has stayed in my head is the strong belief that Sir Topham Hatt should relinquish his Fat Control of the island's railways into safer hands. There are so many train crashes on Sodor it’s really rather disturbing and makes Railtrack, Jarvis, Thames Trains and the like all look very harmless and innocent in comparison. Giving an engine a mind of its own that can operate separately from its driver’s is never going to be a good idea. Couple said engine, “really useful” or not, to some cheeky trucks, get the diesels and the steamies in a fight with each other, and you’re asking for serious trouble, as trains plunge into mines, jump red signals, fall into snow drifts, tip ice cream or paint on each other, get pushed off bridges, fail to get up Gordon’s Hill or hurtle into dockyard walls. Are the holidaymakers on Sodor aware of what they’re letting themselves in for as Thomas or Percy or Henry peep-peep and wheesh into the platform? Why doesn’t some hard-hitting journalist hack turn up and expose Sodor Railway for the disaster it really is?
Of course, most of the crashes must surely be the product of the bored model railway operators’ imaginations. It’s no fun simply letting James or Gordon chug round and round the same old circuit in front of the cameras day in, day out; not when you can knock them flying, send the film into slow motion and create lots of extra smoke. Presumably it’s the same imaginations that lead to the vast amount of innuendo in the Liverpudlian narrative (now no longer Ringo Starr, alas, but Michael Brandon) that I certainly don’t recall being in the Reverend W. Awdry’s original books. Consider, for example, “Thomas crashed hard into a great big bush”, “One ball even knocked the coconut out of his funnel” and Trevor the Traction Engine’s virtually paedophilic “Mm, I love giving rides to children”.
Of course, when all’s said and done, there is also the possibility that the innuendo is simply the product of a bored subtitler’s imagination…