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ABOUT THE SERIES
Adapted from the famous Railway Series, written from 1945 – 2011 by his reverence, Wilbert Awdry and his son, Christopher, Sodor Railway Tales follows the adventures of the anthropomorphic engines on the Island of Sodor, including Thomas the Tank Engine, Edward the Blue Engine, Henry the Green Engine, Gordon the Big Engine, James the Red Engine, Percy the Small Engine, Toby the Tram Engine, Duck the Great Western Engine and many more...
Born in June 1911, Wilbert Awdry, a keen railway enthusiast and clergyman, came up with the idea of these wonderful stories back in 1942 when his 2-year-old son Christopher was ill in bed with measles. To keep Christopher amused during this tough time, Wilbert told him some stories and sung him some rhymes he made up about the talking steam engines on the Island of Sodor. It wouldn’t be until the mid-1940s when, at the encouragement of his wife Margaret, Wilbert finally had those stories published into books, starting with The Three Railway Engines in 1945, and thus… The Railway Series was born…
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What started out as simple bedtime stories for children became a set of more complex meaningful stories that would appeal to anyone of any age, especially those who were railway enthusiasts.
“When you’re writing a children’s book, you’re writing for a whole lot of people. You’re writing for yourself to make sure that you’ve got it researched right. You’re writing for the ‘unfortunate’ parents who’ve got to read it aloud, time after time after time after time; you’ve got to put in little funny bits, subtle bits which they’ll enjoy. And then there’s the simple slapstick stuff which the child will enjoy.”
--Wilbert Awdry, 1988
In fact, being the railway enthusiast Wilbert Awdry was, his reverence was very determined to make the stories he wrote as real as possible as The Railway Series progressed. He would take a lot of inspiration from unusual real-life railway incidents which he recreated for his characters to get in trouble with, and even basing most of the Sodor Railway engines on real-life railway locomotives.
Wilbert had initially planned to write no more stories after the second book Thomas the Tank Engine in 1946, which introduced the most popular character in the series. However, due to popular demand, he continued writing The Railway Series until 1972, having published the 26th book Tramway Engines, and gradually ran out of ideas for more stories. Despite this, he briefly returned to writing in 1984, when he wrote a spin-off story called Thomas's Christmas Party (set after the seventh Railway Series book Toby the Tram Engine from 1952), made for the Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends television series by Britt Allcroft and David Mitton.
It wouldn't be until the early 1980s when Wilbert's son Christopher decided to give continuing the Railway Series legacy a go. In doing so, Christopher wrote a further 14 books, starting with Really Useful Engines in 1983 and ending regular writing in 1996 with New Little Engine. He also wrote three more spin-off stories including Thomas and the Missing Christmas Tree in 1986, Thomas and the Evil Diesel in 1987, and Thomas and the Hurricane in 1992. After Wilbert died in March 1997 aged 85, Christopher did write two more Railway Series books: Thomas and Victoria in 2007 and Thomas and his Friends in 2011, the latter of which celebrated Wilbert's centenary and finally brought The Railway Series to an end.
As a Thomas fan, particularly of the Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends television series during his childhood, filmmaker George Brind had the ambition to make a Thomas project as far back as 2010. By 2015, he had the idea to make a retelling of Wilbert Awdry and his son Christopher’s original Railway Series, considering not all their stories were adapted for the screen, and that Wilbert and Christopher, Wilbert in particular, were disillusioned when the Thomas & Friends production team showed their "lamentable ignorance" of railway practice and "crass inauthenticity" when writing their own stories.
George initially envisioned the series as a format of himself playing a British railway guard called Mr. Fredrickson (based on Mr. Conductor from the early 1990s American spin-off Shining Time Station and the 2000 feature film Thomas and the Magic Railroad) who would tell the stories whilst doing his jobs (similar to CBeebies’ Step Inside). By 2019, George eventually decided to go down the direction of a variety of people narrating a set of stories, similar to CBeebies’ Bedtime Story, as a means of saving himself from spending all that time reading all the stories. And that was how George's ongoing challenge to make a series adapting all of the stories from all 42 books of The Railway Series began.
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Sodor Railway Tales is brought to life by animated illustrations from the original books, music, sound effects (similar to the 1994 direct-to-video adaptation of Val Biro's Gumdrop book series) and a talented variety of different narrators, including George Brind himself, Thomas Brind, Katherine Gell, Jerry De
La Rue, Cheryl Graham, Thomas Puttock, Jen Griffin, Fiona Brind, Claire Brind and Edward Brind,
Tracy Brooker, Richard Brind and Jenny Cole. We hope very much that you enjoy all the stories.
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Railway Series Map recreated by Michael Ubrihien (known as "01Salty" on DeviantArt)
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