#lbscr

Hey it's Stepney's 149th birthday today :3

- William Stroudley, LBSCR Loco. Superintendent.

Beachy Head!

Now, by Brightoners, I assume you mean Thomas and Salty (maybe Rosie, if we stretch it, but no Neville, cause he just doesn't have enough to work with). I mean, they are the only engines who really come from that region (BWBA does not exist, so no one mention Rebecca...).

Now, we'll begin of course with Thomas - the only RWS Southern Railway engine who lives on Sodor, and thus the only engine who really fits into the question. And his reaction is surprisingly muted. Thomas didn't spend a lot, if any, time on the LBSCR. He was built and shipped to Sodor within the span of a year, if not within a couple weeks. This was during the middle of WWI, after all, and Sodor needed engines that the Admiralty had to provide - fast. Thomas is spirited away north at speed, and so he never really identifies with the LBSCR. He's as happy as any steam engine to hear an extinct class has returned, but it's muted by the fact that it feels... distant. Thomas is a NWR engine, and he just never really spent enough time on the LBSCR to develop any connections to the engines from the railway he was built on (see how he reacts to Stepney appearing).

Next - in build chronology - is Rosie. I'm including her simply because she's the only one of these engines who spent a decent amount of time around Brighton and Southampton. During the war, the H2's were either in storage or on other duties, and this brought them into contact with Rosie and the USATC S100s. Rosie admittedly probably doesn't have the fondest memories of the H2's, who were Pullman express engines who never had been demoted to dirty goods trains before the 1940s - and then after the war they all returned to boat trains! I sense a lot of snootiness from this class, and that wouldn't gel great with Rosie the 'war-built shunter who possibly saw front line service'. But Rosie did like them for what they were, and she was sad when the last one was scrapped. She's cautiously excited to meet Beachy Head, the caution being her worries about the new engine possibly having the same snootiness and entitlement their predecessors had.

Finally, we have Salty... who was built a good 4 years after the last of the H2's were scrapped - and ironically is the most excited to hear about the new engine being completed! Salty is a Class 07, which entered service from 1962 in Southampton alongside the remaining E2s, S100s and all the other engines of the Southern, and likely grew up on stories of the H2's and their abilities and glamour. It's not quite hero worship, but more a healthy admiration for these engines that everyone speaks highly of (which may be because they've been gone long enough for the less kind memories that Rosie has to fade).

In what may be an extremely ironic twist of fate, Salty is the most excited about Beachy Head, while Thomas is the least excited, with Rosie falling between them. And this comes about simply because of the experiences each had in relation to the original H2's - Thomas had next to nothing, Rosie has a very realist view of them and their faults and Salty has romanticized stories that encourage him to be excited.

I have a lot of theories and headcanons about Thomas The Tank Engine, and this is just the most recent one I’ve had. While reading Thomas & The Guard again - as you do - I happened to spot this little detail on the opening page:

[Thomas] has two coaches. They are old, and need new paint, but he loves them very much. He calls them Annie and Clarabel. Annie can only take passengers, but Clarabel can take passengers, luggage and the Guard.

And it was that sentence in bold which really caught my attention. Not only does it imply that Annie & Clarabel were not named as such until Thomas received them, but it also suggests that Thomas himself named them. (In the original books, anyway. The TV series implies that they were named long before they met Thomas, and this is all but confirmed in The Adventure Begins.)

But where would Thomas have gotten those names from? Well, to answer that, we just have to look at Thomas’ entry in the Engines section of The Island of Sodor:

A Billinton E2 0-6-0 tank from the London Brighton & South Coast Railway which arrived on Sodor in 1915, no-one quite knows how! His crew got on well with the local people, both married Sodor girls, and by 1920 neither wanted to be parted from their engine or leave the Island.

Again, it’s the bit in bold that’s of interest to us. Now, we don't officially know the names of the women Thomas' crew married (or those of Thomas' crew, for that matter), so this is what I'm thinking: Perhaps their wives happened to also be called Annie and Clarabel, and so when Thomas received his coaches, and wanted to give them names, he thought, what better names to give them than those of his crew's wives?