Headscratchers / The Railway Series

• Can Percy be considered Great Western like Duck and Oliver? The Avonside Engine Company started building engines for the GWR, and they were headquartered at Bristol which was served by the GWR.
  • No, not a proper GWR engine. On that subject, what real-life engine is Percy's supposed basis anyway? Some are speculating Percy is actually a rebuilt Cardiff Railway No. 6 which was supposedly scrapped and his twin No. 5 works to this day at Didcot. Not all that unlikely when you consider how many Welsh standard gauge locomotives were either scrapped or rebuilt when the Great Western took over (only a handful of these escaped).
• When the Scottish Twins arrived, why did the Fat Controller go to all that trouble to make sure only the correct one stayed on Sodor? By all accounts, he'd scored a jolly good bargain: two engines for the price of one!
  • He was probably anticipating being billed for both.
• In Thomas and the Great Railway Show, Thomas meets up with an old friend and running mate by the name of Boxhill, a member of the same class of locomotive as Stepney. All three are based on prototypes built by the London, Brighton, and South Coast Railway, though Thomas was a slightly later model. If all three locomotives operated on the same railway at roughly the same time, why did Stepney and Thomas not seem to recognize each other in Stepney the Bluebell Engine?
  • For what it's worth, the detailed history seems to indicate Thomas spent barely any time at all on the LBSCR before being loaned to the fledgling NWR, possibly not even a year. And it's simply not going to be possible for every engine that worked for the same Railway to have known each other. Admittedly pre-grouping it's more unusual, but it seems the LBSCR was a fairly complex network on its own.
  • The "Terriers" worked everywhere, but mostly only on short-distance runs to which they were regularly allocated. It would be entirely possible for a locomotive to spend years and years just chugging up and down something like the Hayling Island Branch and never encounter any classmates performing similar duties elsewhere.
• If Duke was so special to Sir Handel/Falcon and Peter Sam/Stuart, why didn't they just bring him up to Skarloey the day they got to the Railway? It would have saved them [and Duke] a lot of stress, trauma and loneliness. Skarloey would have understood the situation, with his wise and kind persona and all.
  • Because Falcon and Stuart were first sent to work at the Aluminium Works, then were purchased by the Skarloey Railway. Also decisions about keeping an engine wouldn't be made by Skarloey, but by the Thin Controller.
  • I did know about the whole Aluminium Works Plant thing, but still. Sir Handel and Peter Sam could have mentioned it when they arrived on the SKR, and then all three of them could tell the Thin Controller right away.
  • They may have been afraid to do so. At the time, the Skarloey Railway (like its Welsh counterpart) had just avoided shutdown by becoming a Heritage Railway. There was barely enough money to get Skarloey and Rheneas rebuilt, let alone a third engine that hadn't turned a wheel in nearly twenty years.
• In Little Western, Douglas gets given Toad as his brakevan, and he takes the news well. But... wouldn't he be a bit, I don't know, worried? I mean, Douglas did crush The Spiteful Brakevan on accident, mind you. Toad is a genuinely nice brakevan, and he already saved him. Wouldn't Douglas be afraid of crushing him by mistake?
  • Likely by then, the trucks knew better than to mess about with either of the Scottish Twins, so Toad would have been in safe hands. Douglas would have pulled other trains with other brakevans anyway.
  • Ooh, that's a good idea for a story! I'll have to remember that.
  • Unless Douglas feels like pushing his train from behind up a hill, its unlikely they'll be in another situation like the one that happened to The Spiteful Brakevan.
• Thomas And The Evil Diesel. Why couldn't The Fat Controller have just gotten Duck, Oliver, Stepney or Jinty or Pug to take over for Percy while he was sick?
  • Duck and Oliver could have been too busy on their Branch Line, Pug is most likely scrapped, Jinty might have been preserved (as there are a fair number of his class around), but we don't know, and Stepney... well, it's hard to tell with real engines. He may have been on overhaul or in storage at the time, depending on the year of the story taking place.
  • Plus, by the time of The Evil Diesel's publication, Class 08 shunters were themselves being retired en masse, and would have been widely available for temporary loan on their way to preservation or scrapping.
• The Small Railway was partly revived to excavate waste stone from a closed lead mine for use as ballast. Wouldn't that seriously contaminate the ground alongside the Railway?
  • Yes, it would contaminate the ground, but similar practices have been done in real life. Many lightly ballasted yards sort of just let coal cinders cover the ground as ad-hoc ballasting. Slag tailings were used on various railroads worldwide, such as the Rio Grande in the United States which sourced slag from smelters and steel plants in Utah and then used as ballast over their whole network. The simple fact is railroads as a heavy industry will sometimes turn a blind eye to using polluting materials, even if it has negative environmental effects if the material is cheap and easy to get. Many railroads though now have switched to sandstone and granite rocks for ballast due to the need to support higher quality track though, and those have little polluting effects.
• Why did the North Western Railway get so much independence in BR days? The NWR was nationalized, but they were allowed to keep their own liveries and rolling stock, keep running steam, and seemingly completely avoided the Beeching Axe - how come they kept so much autonomy compared to the rest of the network?
  • Perhaps it wasn't as seriously affected by the war as the Other Railway's predecessors.
  • The islands have always been a special case in British Railways. And Sodor, if it was real, would be the largest of all, with the most extensive network and a measure of political autonomy. Given the Sudrian character of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it," there may have been no real economic incentive to force them to change.
• Is the Arlesdale Railway the smallest example of sapient locomotives in this world or can they go smaller? Is there a requirement for what makes a locomotive "alive" in this universe? I assume the simplest answer would be they need to have a working steam engine or diesel engine to be alive so that rules out model trains. But G-Scale live steam trains exist with working engines, water tanks, and fireboxes. They're pretty large as far as models go, but they're still small enough to be picked up and carried by a single person. Are those alive in this world? How small do the fossil fuel machines go? We have diesel locomotives, tractors, cars, and busses who are alive. Are machines with small engines like motorbikes or lawn mowers alive too?
• Why does "The Island of Sodor: Its People, History and Railways" claim there were 80 different locomotives working on the North Western Railway? It's clear they weren't part of the Fat Controller's fleet since the numbering of his engines never reflects that. One possibility is they were run-through or leased power from the Furness Railway, later LMS, then even later BR; and eventually various companies under Network Rail licenses; but it seems strange to think most of the engines on the railway were never seen in the books at all.
  • Possibly though, there may be a reason why the North Western Railway never ditched steam. If Sir Topham Hatt was able to keep steam running on his railway's own trains while letting BR diesels work the through trains that were coming off the BR Mainline, it allows for the railway to keep steam in a localized space while much of the main work is being done with the visiting diesel engines that would only be on the Railway long enough to drop off their trucks and/or coaches and pick up outbound traffic.
• Falcon/Sir Handel is older than Stanley would have been, and was already on the Mid Sodor Railway by the time Stanley was there as well. Why does he need Duke to remind him of Stanley's demise and retirement then? There is a continuity goof showing Stanley in the background of "Bulldog" as well (set well before Stanley's real life class the Baldwin 10-12-D was built), but it does further remind us that Falcon would have known the doomed engine personally.