Railway 200: In praise of TV’s most famous locomotive
In celebrating trains on screen for the 200th anniversary of Britain’s passenger railways, who could forget a certain tank engine called Thomas, who debuted on television in 1984 and would later become a huge international franchise.
If you are a millennial and you are told that this year marked 200 years of railway locomotion, which on-screen train comes to mind? Chances are that your brain will hook on to the image of a compact blue engine, with a round face and googly eyes and eerily static expressions. Yes, for 1980s children Thomas the Tank Engine is the ultimate screen steam locomotive, as recognisable and beloved as Mickey Mouse or Winnie the Pooh.
If you aren’t aware (perhaps you skipped childhood), Thomas is a cheeky little loco who lives and works on the fictional island of Sodor. With his integrated fuel tank, he can shunt other engines and carriages up and down the island’s railways, stations and yards. His creation predates the much loved Central Television series by 40 years, when the Reverend Wilbert Awdry tried to entertain his poorly toddler with stories about Thomas and his friends.
In the late 1970s, TV producer and screenwriter Britt Allcroft persuaded Awdry that his engines would delight young television audiences and secured the rights to the characters. Together with her husband, Angus Wright, Allcroft produced the series Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends in what she described as “live action model animation”.
On 9 October 1984, the day that the series debuted on the ITV network, the reverend appeared on TV-am’s Good Morning Britain and, after (somewhat reluctantly) telling well-trodden tales about his books, rightly credited Allcroft with masterminding Thomas’s jump to TV. Little did anyone know quite how big a phenomenon the show would prove to be.
The models of the engines could move along the model railway tracks (with real steam!), their eyes could be puppeteered, but the rest of their expressions changed between camera shots. So far, so charming, but it was two further elements that cemented the appeal of Thomas the television series: the percussive piano theme by Mike O’Donnell and Junior Campbell, and the narration by former Beatle Ringo Starr.
The first episode to air was ‘Thomas and Gordon’, in which the small and fun-loving Thomas is humbled by the large and serious passenger engine Gordon. Unfortunately, the BFI National Archive had not yet commenced recording television programmes off-air, but the BFI preserved one of the earliest repeats of this episode a year later in 1985 on 1-inch tape, which was later migrated and digitised and is now available in the Mediatheque.
From these beguiling homespun origins, Thomas and his friends raced to become an international franchise when it was retooled for the American market in the late 1980s. However, what’s remarkable is that for a long time Allcroft and the team she assembled maintained creative control, across many spin-offs and straight-to-video films, and the shift from live action to CGI animation.
In 2000 Allcroft even directed a feature film, Thomas and the Magic Railroad. Appearing on Open House with Gloria Hunniford to promote the film, Allcroft stated that while the animation may change, “the wonderful thing about Thomas is it creates a worldwide community of people”.
By the time the series Thomas & Friends finally ended in 2021, it looked and felt very different from that first episode in 1984. Mattel had already taken ownership of the franchise in the 2010s, and over time more elements of storytelling were added: the engines could travel overseas, Thomas could deliver morals direct to camera, and singalong musical interludes bookended each episode. While Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends ended, Cartoon Network rebooted it as Thomas & Friends: All Engines Go in 2021. The franchise lives on.