Jobey. Any pronouns. Adult, will be cursin' and cussin'. RWS/TTTE/Sodor blog. Home to The Best Henry Tunnel Headcanon Ever, Coppernob fic incubation, and transman!Topham Hatt I.
This is Merkland, built in 1912 by Hudswell Clarke (works no. 977) for the Llanelly and Mynydd Mawr Railway in Wales. She was taken into GWR stock at the grouping and numbered 937, but withdrawn and scrapped in 1923. As far as I can tell, this is the only photo of her that exists; it doesnāt even seem to be online anywhere (I bought this copy physically from a store selling old railway photos and books) although it is included in M. C. R. Priceās book on the Llanelly and Mynydd Mawr; which is a shame because she really does look to be a dead ringer for Thomas. She has the extended side tanks, the splashers, and the right proportions (at least for after Thomas Comes to Breakfast); I think she might actually be the closest IRL thing to how Thomas is drawn in the RWS.
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Asking because you are the only person I know who is in the relevant fandoms, please ignore if this is too random:
I've just discovered that one of my OCs is only one year younger than Yoko Ono and would have been living in Tokyo at the same times she was as a kid... do I say they knew each other lol? IDK how much it would actually come up but it might be really funny IMO
Is the OC an engine, human, or other? ;)
I mean, assuming human, as I'm sure you know Tokyo was a very big place, and Yoko's family was very rich/fancy. So... tell us more about this OC.
@lightning-studios I rummaged through the concept sketches I did for the Barbara fic. One of them is decent. Still very young Barbara had to be hustled onto a train from Home to Town for a certain semi-emergency. At the end of the line, she has a chance to catch her bearings.
No one will ever guess ahead of time which engine is here featured. No one.
1919? 1920? (I can't really recall the timeline)
"Miss," said a voice. Both reproachful and saddened. "Do stop crying."
"I'm not crying," she sobbed. Their combined voices were too much for her, and her weeping intensified; she burrowed her hands deeply in her hair and yanked hard at the roots, scrambling for control.Ā "Go away."
"I can't."
"I'll scream," she warned. Already she felt her blood pumping through every little vein in her body, panic rising in her throat.
"I have no driver."
The panic slowed. The girl peeked from behind her hands, suspiciously studying the engine's empty cab.
For several moments she was lost, mesmerized by the complicated knobs and levers and gauges, how everything was connected in complex ways to the rest.
Then she realized what she wasn't seeing. The engine had spoken the truth. He wouldn't be able to go anywhereāshe'd have to go, herself.
But she felt quite calm now, especially when she kept her eyes roving up and down the strange, knobbly controls.
"I hate you," she announced, and her voice cracked despite herself. "I wasn't ready. But you made Nanny drag me onto your horrid train!"
"I'm sorry," said the engine. He really did sound sorry, eying her now with a new sympathy. "But we had to leave by 9.38."
"Why?"
"Because the train had to come in here by ten after."
"Why?"
He looked at her in faint bemusement. "Because that's what it says on the time-tables."
"I don't care about those stupid time-tables."
"But I do. I'm an engine. I have to follow them."
This struck her as fairly reasonable.
Now in curiosity rather than accusation, she said: "What happens if you don't?"
"Why, if one train is late, it affects all the others. Passengers miss their connections; the station-pilots can't rearrange the trains in time; engines must run harder to make up time, and that means more work for the fitters down the line... everyone on a railway is connected, you know."
The girl considered.
"I didn't realize engines talked so much," she concluded at last, with her usual air of disapproval.
Unlike most people, the engine didn't take offense. He only smiled. "Perhaps I talk too much. Back home they sometimes told me so. Anyhow, I'm glad you're no longer frightened."
At first she was only very still. But, gradually, you could see her start to crumple, from the inside out.
"I don't want to ride a train ever again."
He looked at her kindly. "But you must return home, miss."
"No."
"Don't you want to go home?"
More than anything! If only they'd never left!
She thought it over. "I'll walk," she said. She liked walking. So long as no one made her hold hands. So long as no one rushed her. But she was very strong; everyone said so. She could walk for miles and miles without tiring, for all she was so little.
She tried to explain this to the engine, but he disagreed. It was far too many miles for that. "And the roads are impassible at Maron. Unless you can ride a horse, I suppose."
The girl shuddered. She was more frightened of horses than anything.
At least trains followed time-tables. They didn't move till after the guard whistledāthey didn't pull any sudden moves on you. Sensible creatures really.
"I suppose I might be able to go back," she said, voice barely above a whisper. "If it's on your train."
"Melbourne is going to take the return."
"No! I can't bear a strange engine, I can't bear it. I want you."
"I can't, I'm on the afternoon express..." He trailed off, gaze fixing on her.
"Don't stare," scolded the girl. She hated to be stared at, and she'd been told off doing it herself many times before.
She didn't know that her hair was dishevelled, her eyes red, and her face tear-streaked.
"We'll see," he said softly. "I'll ask Driver what can be done."
Probably totally misremembering but I remember you writing (or at least reblogging) a headcanon post about Barbara Hatt and I can't find it for the life of me
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Every flock of āGulls needs a Sharpie to ruffle some feathers, right?
Ta-da! My recent hyperfixation on The Bird At Barrow Central, a fanfic Iāve been wanting to check out for ages, is taking me by storm. I wanted to model an engine from Jobeyās fics, and I decided to make a Furness Sharpie!
Is it a D3? A D4? Honestly, it could be either. I wanted the model to match Edward in style, so I used Jamesā prop as primary reference. I chose number 15 for this Sharp since itās one of the ones in chapter 5 of A Hole In The Net, and the whole scene with 34 at the sheds hit me like a brick.
Iād love to model more Furness engines sometime soon - maybe Coppernob or Poppet?
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An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends, The Railway Series - W. Awdry
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Thomas (Thomas the Tank Engine), Edward (Thomas the Tank Engine), Gordon (Thomas the Tank Engine), Rosie (Thomas the Tank Engine), The Fat Controller (Thomas the Tank Engine)
Additional Tags: I Donāt Even Know, Punk, Punk Rock, the html on this sunnovabitch, Parody
Summary:
A āmusicalā tributeā¦
Thomas WAS a good engine who did what his adoptive father told him. Waited patiently for better days, better luck.
And then they took Dad away, and he got fed up. He thinks maybe itās time the engines start making their own luck.
Meanwhile, the Fat Controller is singing at his own reflection, so you know heās completely mentally sane.
@mean-scarlet-deceiverĀ
Do you think the nwr sees a lot of terminally ill children whoās wish is to meet the engines? Theyāve read the books and watched the show while in the hospital and their wish is to go to Sodor and finally meet their heroes.
A little boy waiting for a heart transplant relates to Henry, both were born with defects and feels like no one understands their suffering, and then they are given an opportunity to have their defects fixed.
A girl has a Thomas face mask and a girl has a prosthetic leg with Thomas printed it.
The engines donāt fully understand the childrenās conditions, one time Percy thought that they came to the island to be āmended at the steamworksā. They just know that these children want to visit them like the other hundreds of children. They were taught how to act around children, even though some engines arenāt good around children, they know that these children came all this way to meet them.
Edward makes every meeting feel personal, heās the type of engine who will take the time to reply personally to all the fan mail he gets. When he learns that one of the children who visited them passed away, he sends a special personal letter and a few toys for the child to be buried with.
Sometimes the children are too sick to travel, so they set up a video chat with the engines. The engines arenāt very good at video chatting yet. Sometimes it turns pretty funny.
One boy with MS asked for his wish to be the fat controller for a day, sir topham gave him a tour of the railway and let him ride in Winston. The boy showed up dressed as sir topham and was glowing.
This is rough on my feels to think about. But you are no doubt correct.
Mister Spong??????? I was not aware you were chill like that.
It's crazy how Clive Spong has actually done really good illustrations, but only for supplemental materials. I don't understand why so many of the faces in the canonical Christopher books look so godawful. Clearly he's capable of better.
We learned at one of the Awdry events that it's down to canvas size, basically for all of the books he was painting them at roughly the size they were going to be in the book.
Donald and Douglas are proud of their nationality and clearly fond of their shared memories. But they don't necessarily go around bragging on the Caley. (If anything, you might well infer from some of their statements in RWS that they feel comfortably certain that, despite the initial mess and drama, in coming to Sodor they have traded up.)
Gordon seems to be set up as the foil to Duck, in this respect. He's the only other one who has a similar prideāprobably. The things he and Duck bicker about in "Gordon Goes Foreign" and "Domeless Engines" are proxy issues for the North Eastern vs. Great Western rivalry, so I assume Gordon has some company pride as well as some personal pride. (Then again, that's arguable. He could just not give a damn about his old railway... but be absolutely unwilling to let Duck or bloody showoff domeless engines have the last word about anything!)
But with Gordon it's not half as intriguing, lol. He has enough oblivious self-importance healthy self-esteem that I don't see him being a bit rattled at the idea that a railway company he took pride in would sell him off for a song. He would have a million ways to rationalize or handwave that! Also, I can 100% believe that Gordon thinks of himself as G.N.R. more than L.N.E.R., and since he was offloaded right during the Grouping period that seems like convenient cover ("Oh well everything was a little nutty then as the big new railway took overānew brooms sweep cleanātheir loss! But if the G.N.R. hadn't been taken over surely they would have seen my worth and kept me on.")
Duck, though. Duck.
I mean, yes, he was sent to Sodor after nationalisation, so again not technically by The Great Western Railway but merely by 'the Western region.' Maybe that offers a buffer for him, emotionally? But let's be honestāit was still the same management, still the same people. The Western retained a lot of their old maverick tendencies, to wit:
---
rest of the country: so, we're adopting a standard gauge
g.w.r.: haha
g.w.r.: sod off, we will keep our broad gauge until you literally pry it out of our hands
---
all the other railways: here's our latest new common safety standard
g.w.r.: our way is better and we're not changing
---
rest of b.r.: diesel-electrics, baby
g.w.r.: dIeSeL-hYdRaULiCs
---
They even insisted on keeping one steam line open! And the B.R. backed down!
But, well, they agreed to dieselise shunting operations. They even agreed to have those Midland diesel-electric 08s come over.
Well heres an angle he may see it as. Engines were always getting replaced, even in the GWR.
City of Turo was preserved, not by the GWR, but by the LNER. The Great Western was going to scrap him until the LNER asked for Turo for their collection.
The Modernization Plan was only odd bc of the speed, and how young the engines were. 30 years was more or less average life expectancy for an engine, then they would be scrapped. It has always been that way, since the railways settled into their norms. Even, maybe even especially, on the GWR.
From what I've seen Duck is prolly from one of the first batches, circa 1929/1930 based on his exact details. So hes 25, 26 arriving on Sodor...
That's about right as far as he would be concerned. Slightly young, but by no means unheard of, especially since he was being sold on rather than scrapped.
Now he would be completely horrified by the Modernization plan and the mass scrapping of steam engines (and later the early diesels and electrics.) but honestly I don't know if he ever really thought about his own sale.
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I don't know if your turo actually hates diesels or if it was just a what if, but if he really does hate diesels, what was his time like in the Netherlands in your mind?
(bonus turo question: turo gets plopped in America, what happens, hypothetically?)
I wish I could give a more interesting answer, but even after trying to crack this one mentally several times since reading your ask ā yeah, I dunno!
Diesel-hating Truro was purely a What If/plotbunny for me, which obviously Joe cared for so well after adopting it that I think the story on that is settled forever ā and I'd be curious to know his answer.
As for me, my "headcanonical" interpretation of Truro is always that he's sort of such a smooth operator, so flawlessly and effortlessly charming, that it's really hard to see under the public mask ā or to determine if anything is under there at all. I find it very hard to make a main character of him.
The hypothetical plopped-in-America is definitely more intriguing to me, because I think it would take that big of a move to really throw Truro off his own game. It would only be that far away from the spirit of home that he'd be shaken up enough for us (and maybe for him!) to find out who he is underneath "consummate master of public relations." I doubt six weeks in the Netherlands was far enough out of his own orbit to do the trick. A trip overseas would probably be longer than six weeks, however, so it would really put stress on Truro in a way that would be interesting... but I'm still not sure if I could see what it would do to him. I can almost imagine him really breaking because he'd be so removed from everything that's kept him going for so long... it'd kinda be cruel to do it to him, tbh, but I don't think anyone (including himself) would know that he couldn't handle it until he was there. (Obviously, I think he'd handle it very differently from Scotsman; I think Scotsman's far less polished-to-his-very-soul and Great Western and that he enjoyed the big travels ā apart from the financial problems.)
Alternatively, I can see Truro having Duck All-At-Sea-esque dreams of faraway travel, but that he's never confessed. So as an alternative I can imagine such a journey being a dream come true.
The thing about Truro is that while he's been the face of his railway for so long that he has learned the importance of his public perception (much of it too while that railway was a fallen flag, which has its own implications and responsibilities), his ascent to fame happened well before the advent of modern advertising, marketing, and public relations so he really wouldn't be particularly talented at PR in any modern estimation.
He was Just Some Guy before any of that happened for him. That it did at all would have been as much a surprise to him as anyone else, since the thing he's famous for was kept secret for five years after he did it. Truro would have had no expectation for the role he's been made to assume. He does it and does it well - as well as he would have been expected in the 1910's - but he wasn't drawn for it. It is a job beyond what he was meant to do.
That said, he does seem to have marked social graces right out of the box.
The books imply it was only Duck he spent all night talking "Great Western" with, but the show revises it to be that Truro spends all night talking to all the engines at Tidmouth aside from Gordon. Even excepting Gordon from the mix, that's still no small feat balancing those personalities pleasantly all evening.
Edward also notes the next day that Truro whistles as he passes on his way to leave, which the TVS establishes to be a common courtesy but we know sometimes engines - especially snooty self-important engines - are remiss in this. You can chalk that up to either being a GWR engine who always minds his manners or just being a regular guy who happened to have ended up famous and hasn't forgotten what he actually is because at this point in time, being famous isn't really that different except that you have to stand around and let people look at you a lot more.
Also bears remembering that the GWR wasn't some posh high-falootin' railway either. All their Ways and high-mindedness - that was the put on. They were themselves regular guys simply wearing a veneer of class. While Duck may be reluctant to let the kayfabe slip, other GWR engines - and I suspect Truro especially given that he was essentially made the face of his railway and so was supposed to exemplify it in its entirety - like to give a wink wink nod nod to this.
I do think he did learn more through being a famous engine, but he wouldn't have been taught it or known it innately so much as just figured it out through trial and error.
But by the time he meets Duck, he's got the flow of these conversations under control though. After all, he is also a passenger engine and knows the importance of leaving one with a good experience.
Duck approaches shyly and asks if he may speak to Truro. So right off, Truro recognizes Duck as someone nervous to talk to a famous engine. He smiles, because he is after all Just some Guy and is just as approachable as anyone else. I'd go so far as even to say that he likes the opportunity this presents because he is still Just Some Guy and as soon as they get over that hurdle, it'll be just like being back in a Yard.
"Of course. I see you are one of Us."
Perfect opener because it lets Duck choose any number of ways to respond to it, letting him lead the conversation into whatever he'd like to talk about, while also showing Truro's interest in him. Even more perfect actually because it draws an immediate likeness between the two of them. Like, it's practically a gimme with another Great Western, but he could do this with other engines. If Truro met Percy pulling the mail, he could remark on this to gauge how Percy feels about the mail train and go from there. Even Gordon he could ask how fast he goes and then, likely getting a snappy response, demur about his own record and say he only did that once, but to go as fast as Gordon every day is quite impressive. You know, like how Stepney (also Just Some Guy who became moderately famous through happenstance) does with Thomas to smooth over sidelining him on his own branch line.
Duck chooses to say that he tries to teach the NWR their Ways. Truro's response is a little hand-wavey here: "That's right. All ship-shape and Swindon fashion." Could be just a vague statement of how things ought to be since he hasn't actually seen much of the railway yet. Could even be taken as a compliment, that he sees Duck's influence on the place. Either way, they're off!
Of course, Duck asks about the speed run, but now Truro gets to recount this to a friend and colleague, not a shy and nervous fan.
And in any event, he can't spend ALL night talking about this one cool thing he did, so he must have kept that evening going by asking the hometown engines about themselves instead.
Basically, all signs point to Truro just being a regular guy, one of twenty, who fell into fame and just learned a thing or two about how to manage it since then. Which makes sense because Awdry, the biggest GWR fanboy in the world, is not about to make the City of Truro a stuck-up snob.
Uhh....hi again TTTE fandom, I didn't see you there. ADHD took me on a ride since I last was posting actively, a job came and went, Awdry Ex 5 was a grand old time despite my focus on other interests and I've been rotating various other nerdy schtuff around the noggin before eventually arriving back here as I tend to do. (Thank Wonders of Sodor)
Been spending the last few days immersing myself back in with our sentient vehicle pals and a big part of that for me is Trainz, once I went messing with various graphical settings and experiencing a slew of various "grass is greener/less pixelated on the other side/friends PC" based emotions I have a couple of shots here based around "Small World" by @mean-scarlet-deceiver and "God Rest Ye Merry North-Westerners" by @joezworld two of my very favorite fanfics in the Thomas Sphere.
First of is a scene in "God Rest Ye Merry North Westerners" where Truro is being a slimy git as per while Thomas' first trip up to Arlesburgh is quickly becoming even more concerning than Bear's failed transmission had already made things !
Went for a TV look here as we currently have no "RWS" style Truro with a decent face and this fabulous one was made by a buddy, Kellsthrope.
Not an exact match to the text but I have made sure to include a smattering of details such as a certain type of brake-van in the background to at least show I was paying attention to the text !
Much like "God Rest Ye" is written with a distinct RWS bent so to is "Small World" written with a TV Series setting so for the sake of parity I also decided to flip that switch when taking this shot for parity's sake.
This confrontation between Bertie (who the text implies is no longer red, oops!) and an extremely run down Thomas is one of my favourite scenes for showing how dire the straights are getting as the war of attrition between "The Big Wheel" and The Fat Controller continues to persist. Bertie hasn't been thought humility in this timeline and the chip in Thomas' proverbial shoulder is out in full force in response. The differences between their counterparts here and in the main timeline really shows how the domino effect is progressing in a world without James.
Big Shoutsout to both @mean-scarlet-deceiver and @joezworld these screenshots are a result of but a fraction of my esteem for both of these stories and I hope you both get some enjoyment from the results of my own.
In regards to my own "AU" or "blog equivalent of playing dolls" a.k.a Our Magnificent Machines, god only knows when the stars and brain chemicals will align and have me finally finish the Shining Time Spur Lore but i shall get there one day, I appreciate all of you who have dropped a like on what is already there, it's heartening that the results of spinning things around in my brain bring some amusement to others and I hope that y'all are enjoying playing around in your own little sandboxes as much as I enjoy playing in mine !
