Trivia / The Railway Series B1 "The Three Railway Engines"

• Executive Meddling: Edmund Ward agreed to publish the book so long as Awdry wrote a fourth story where the three engines interact and Henry gets a Happy Ending.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: Early editions were illustrated by William Middleton. In 1949 C. Reginald Dalby redrawn the book and his illustrations were used in all reprints onwards.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The book was originally to only have three stories, with Edward and Gordon's railway originally having no connection to Henry and the Fat Director. This also meant Henry was to have stayed bricked up originally. At Edmund Ward's request, Awdry wrote a Happy Ending for Henry where the three engines met. Who knows how differently the future Worldbuilding of the books may have transcribed if not for this pivotal mandate.
  • Henry was originally intended to be a 4-4-2 Atlantic, thus an ideal middle size between Edward and Gordon. However Middleton did not adapt this into his illustrations, instead making him almost identical to Gordon, a change Dalby and all future illustrators made the mistake of emulating. Similar to the above, this ended up playing a rather large part into the lore building of future titles as Awdry made attempts to work around this error.