[transsexualunderground]

places to read the railway series (and some other ttte related works)... FOR FREE!

so, I'm not sure if everyone on TTTE tumblr has gotten a chance to read the RWS, so I thought I'd post some links! Note that for some of these you'll need an Internet Archive account to check out the books as it's a virtual library. It's worth it, though! They have a LOT of books!

Internet archive 60th anniversary story collection - Only goes up to "The Twin Engines" but I do like that it contains the forewords. However, I believe those can be found on the TTTE wiki, so you may not find them necessary.

Internet archive Thomas the Tank Engine - the complete collection - All W. Awdry books in one!

All Christopher Awdry railway series books - This one's a pdf.

Internet archive The Island of Sodor, Its People, History and Railways - A non-picture book lore source that's rare to find physically. Also a pdf!

And, as a bonus...

Ongoing archive of Marvel Thomas magazines - This one's being run by @/KingoftheTWR on Twitter. I like reading these, they have quite a few original stories and I am especially fond of the "Write to: The Fat Controller" section! I suggest sorting them by name that way you can start at issue one and not have to run around the archive whenever some of them were uploaded out of order.

[yugirimistwalker]

The trolley is about to run over all sentient life in the galaxy. You cannot switch the tracks, but you can still save everyone’s lives by pulling one of three levers, all of which involve sacrificing yourself. The red lever will destroy all trolleys, but will also kill you as well as all public transportation across the galaxy. The blue lever will merge your own consciousness with all trolleys, allowing you to control them and stop the trolley from running everyone over. The green lever will use your body as a catalyst to synthesize organic life and public transportation together - organic life will no longer be stuck in the cycle of creating public transportation that rebels against its creators, and both forms of life will finally be free.

[whirligig-girl]

[ryan1014n2]

[visionarylocomotiveworks]

Happy Monday everyone!

Hope the start of your week is going better than Sir Handel's is…

Did this one awhile ago, but fans of EnterprisingEngine93's series should find this kind of scene familiar.

[houseboatisland]

ok so apparently i’m a machine that generates TTTE au’s but never actually writes them so i’m just gonna compile all the ones i can currently remember. is it for posterity? future reference? self-humiliation? we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.

1. 💙💧Blue Sodor💧💙

a.k.a “Oh, oh oh, you don’t want blue flavor? You don’t want blue flavor, huh? That’s crazy. Mr. Too Good for Blue, over here. Here, have a large cup of blue. On the house. Get out of my face. Bozo. I spit on people like you. P t o o.”

tl;dr: James isn’t given the choice to be red after his accident, thus the universalness of NWR Blue is never broken. The ramifications of this are… surprisingly huge. (The butterfly effect giveth and the butterfly effect taketh away.)

James for starters will be a completely different engine. A mild-mannered everyman whose rough-and-tumble LYR upbringing occasionally resurfaces in times of dire stress or conflict… but 99% of the time it doesn’t. He’s like if the archetypal Water Cooler Guy from an office was an engine, (a fate worse than death, if you’d ask the “irl” James.)

A Sodor without room for unique colors or James the Red Engine’s ✨panache✨ may find fame less easy to capture. It definitely won’t make it on the telly; “kids watching could confuse one engine for another! We’d better film elsewhere, crew.”

Fame is of course the NWR’s ace in the hole, its paprika at the cookout, if you will. If you remove it, it quickly becomes just another railway, (or an unseasoned chicken breast indistinguishable from a lump of rubber at the cookout mentioned prior,) and if the NWR’s just another railway… things are on shakier ground.

This’ll be a commonality in all of these AUs really: the fact that Sodor isn’t allowed to develop as it did “irl,” (a colorful, caring if overly snippy place,) usually leads to either unsatisfying success, hand-to-mouth existence, or all-out ruin.

2. 🤜Two Big Engines🤛

a.k.a. “Sodor has become a highschool hallway with rails and there’s two jocks in it shoving the tank engines into lockers.”

tl;dr: Henry was built as a well-performing Pacific from the outset. Once on Sodor, he and Gordon rule the roost pretty unhindered, becoming an insufferable pair of snots that are untouchable considering they do carry the place, much as they shouldn’t be told so. The railway is, compared to “irl,” pretty sour, charmless, and most of all less empathetic. And likely dieselizes down the road. Thanks fellas.

Also poor James is reduced to either (a) a simpering squib, (b) a bitter little wallflower, or (c) a blend of A and B.

Major kudos to @/mean-scarlet-deceiver for inspiring this one!

3. 2️⃣Edward the Twin Engine2️⃣

After chatting about their oc, good-ol’-sound-as-a-bell 36, MSD and I once headcanoned up a brother for Edward who was, more or less, the engine-sona of Chuck McGill from BCS: brutally competent under the right circumstances, waspish, celebrated a bit too much for his own good, emotionally stilted and unavailable. In this AU he’s with Edward on Sodor from the very beginning. (I call this engine Charles; MSD prefers Lewis. We’re in arbitration.)

tl;dr: This AU examines a Sodor and an Edward developing with this new personality in the mix.

Is there less room for nonsense? Or more? Is Thomas gonna be more of a loose cannon under Charles’ tutelage or will he be more under heel than we’re used to? Is Edward gonna be a less admirable and wise engine in his brother’s shadow, and go full Saul Goodman? (Ignoring the lack of legal drama, meth dealing, Chicago sun—okay I’ll stop.)

4. 1️⃣Thomas, Minus Friends🪦

a.k.a. “OHHHhhh mygodthey’realldead. They’re all DEAD! what the fuck dude. what the fuuuck.”

This one I’ll admit is a bit unsubtle and over the top but I kind of don’t care.

tl;dr: The Railway Series books were only fairly successful, the Hatts lost influence early on, and the NWR wasn’t as financially comfortable, ergo Thomas is preserved as a sort of show-pony trinket… but hardly anyone else we know from the railway joins him. They were all scrapped by the late ‘60s in line with the rest of BR steam.

Thomas, (who at least still has Annie and Clarabel otherwise he’d just be out of reasons to live,) ekes out a hollow, smile-for-the-cameras existence. He’s dispirited, lonely in a future that he doesn’t feel was worth living to see, guilty that he was chosen to endure while his friends weren’t, visibly 100 as opposed to physically 100, and actually finds tourists PRETTY DAMN ANNOYING for making this living death of his happen and continue in the first place!

…

So those were all fun. Are they getting written? It’s dubious. Will I ever make an AU where things are jusr genuinely nice and copasedic? Fuuuuuuuck no, what’s the entertainment in that?😇

[mean-scarlet-deceiver]

SIR the 'edward the twin engine' au is s'posed to be genuinely nice and copacetic goddammit! 😉

36 becoming north western led to so many good compounded ripple effects that we literally refer to sodor in that timeline as 'Vast World' pfffttt. no one bullied edward. he and lewis/charles were the world's best carrot-and-stick team. henry was never locked in the tunnel. gordon felt more understood. we redeemed a Big Blue Bastard. james considered offering charles/lewis to be repainted in his red (and then he rejected the idea but, yknow. it speaks volumes that he entertained it for more than .002 seconds.) bill and ben had so much fun. hell by 2000 this timeline probably achieves lasting world peace.

i just can't stop you from leaning into the McGill-brothers-angst of it all lmao

but i will state the alternate interpretation for the record 😌 my original fic with 36 was the dark-and-grim one. the au where he stays on sodor? that's the good ending. that's fluff*.

*YMMV

[mean-scarlet-deceiver]

that Thomas Alone shit is EVIL btw 😭😭😭

[imitation-steamroller]

Been wondering this for a long time.

Which design do you prefer?

Pink Rosie

Red Rosie

Voting ended onJul 28

[sodorz]

thinking abt how fucked up steam engine boiler explosions can look. theyre just pipes under there

gives me the idea of a ghost/monster engine that looks normal, albeit a bit battered, only to swing their smokebox door open and a myriad of pipes come bursting out like fucked up tentacles

[marlynnofmany]

I didn’t know a train could be an eldritch horror, but here we are.

[siphersaysstuff]

The Call of C'thchoochoo.

[spectralgecko]

quality and tidiness went out the window cuz it's almost midnight, but I wanted to get this idea for Lady out. Contemplating giving her a couple different "vessel" forms in this AU, one closer to her appearance in Magic Railroad, and one with the Dean Single concept. Not super happy with this as it is, but it's Somethin' To Work With lol

[theflyingkipper]

tell me everything about your interpretations of real life locomotives

i just think they're neat

hello I am so sorry for making you wait months for an answer on this, I hope this is good!!

So I do have some locomotives from real life as part of my headcanons for TTTE characters (for example, Onslaught, Glory, and Greyhound are part of my D10 lore- and in my headcanon Diesel 10 is warship D810 “Cockade”)

But there are a few that don’t exactly relate to TTTE. I’ll be talking specifically about how I characterize them, with some links to past artwork I’ve done and any other informative links

Santa Fe 2926 (or “Santi”)

(2926 is the only one I’ve given a name that’s different from its running number so far, since shes the only one ive officially made into an OC)

Santi had a very short working life when she was still in service, and spent decades as a static display in a park. Oddly enough, shes not so grouchy as most display engines tend to become. I like to think she was in limbo for the most part while on display, kind of like Duke being buried in the shed. (Or like Captain America getting frozen for 75 years) When she woke up during the beginning of her restoration in the early 2000s, she was unaware of how much time had passed- which was very disorienting. Fortunately she’s had the restoration team catch her up on the last 60 years of human history.

Santi as of writing this post hasn’t been on any excursions yet as far as I know, and is still cooped up in the yard. I think she keeps an audio log of how she’s slowly going crazy in there.

“Day 325 - the restoration team fixed my whistle! Its a shame I have no one of my own kind to scream at with it!”

I think Santi and R&N 2102 are pen pals. preserved 4-8-4 besties for life ❤️🚂

they narrate what they want written out loud to their engineers, they both sign off with 0000-00000000-0000, their shared wheel arrangement in text.

~

Denver and Rio Grande K36s

(I want to give them names, and they’d probably all start with the same letter)

9 out of 10 of the K36s are preserved, the 5th one got scrapped. In reality, the group is split across the Cumbres and Toltec Scenic Railroad and the Durango & Silverton, but for the sake of this interpretation they’re all together

I found out about the K36s through a video by History in the Dark, he has a series of videos of “10 of the best trains ever”. I cant find the exact episode :(

Imagine the Dieseasel but there’s NINE of bill and ben instead of two. Though they aren’t as mischievous, they’re definitely just as irritating. They’re sort of a strange hive mind of little engines, akin to Ariel’s sisters in the Little Mermaid. Any time something spectacular happens on their railway, they find some way to spiritually communicate the happening to dear #485, their sibling who fell in a turntable and had to be scrapped- her damage was too severe. Though 485 was very much like the rest of them, she sort of becomes their saint- who they leave offerings of coal and water for in her old shed berth like its a medieval icon. Any time one of them misbehaves, one of their siblings is sure to tell them that 485 would be ashamed and she is not smiling on them right now.

Although this strays from their real life history quite a bit (and their gauge, which is 3ft), I think it would be hilarious if Thomas met them in a RWS-ified BWBA. He comes to their little railway and they all go front over wheels about their strange visitor. I also think the dynamic between them would be interesting, since the K36s are 9 out of their original 10, and Thomas is 1 out of the original 10 E2s. However, It’d probably take a while to get to that point in conversation with how supremely creeped out Thomas is by the K36s slightly cultish practices

Also, they’d probably chase him out of their little railway with pitchforks and acetylene torches if he brought up anything about turntables. They’re a bit of a touchy subject .

~

NKP 765

the 765 isn’t hard to find videos of XD Since shes the pride of the Nickel Plate Road and not converted to burn oil like lots of other large preserved engines, she takes pride in her unique status. I like to think she has the attitude of a great aunt or grandma with a gritty sense of humor and a laugh that could shake the walls. She does get puffed up in the smokebox, though, and has a hard time admitting she’s wrong. She has a bit of a parental relationship with the diesels on her railway, some of whom call her “granny”, and other endearments relating to her age.

~

New Zealand V Class

in a very different vein than everyone else, the V class all met the absolutely horrifying fate of being BURIED IN MUD

in my interpretation of them, The V Class have all become eldritch horror abominations, and local engines have kept their ghost stories alive and well. (usually taking the form of wayward vengeful spectres that like to make themselves known in uncomfortable places)

I had an idea where the V class emerges as one giant metal monster festooned with river sediment and garbage and terrorizes the locals but I don’t know enough about New Zealand or its railways to make an effective story.

[mewymarsher]

Lolly for Henry

[just-someone-online]

The crazy thing about getting to hear a steam engine's whistle in person for the first time is that at first, you have no fucking clue what that is. It's just a deep howling noise that's echoing in the distance.

And then there's this deep breathing sound to accompany it that's slowly getting louder and louder as it gets closer. You look towards where the sound is coming from and you see a glowing light coming round a bend in the distance, surrounded by a big black thing that your eyes haven't fully processed yet.

You hear that howl again, and now that it's closer you know what's coming. It's a train. A big one. The biggest goddamn train you've ever seen in your life. It just rolls on by like it owns the place, five diesels and sixteen coaches gliding behind it. It's belching smoke and steam like a dragon breathing out.

And right as it passes where you're sitting. It whistles. When you're right there, it's this massive, booming, bellow that leaves your ears ringing. You could never be prepared to hear it up close for the first time. However loud you think it is from watching news reports or YouTube videos? It's louder. You watch it trail away and realize that its presence left you shaking.

Anyway, I got to see 4014 today. I can die happy.

[cheesylov]

When your engines keep on causing confusion and delay

-------------------------------------------------

Note from me- I noticed you all really liked the last meme I posted so I might make this a regular thing, so KISSES TO EVERYONE I LOVE U ALLL😚

[heyheyhaydn]

Sir Topham Hattsune Miku

[draconym]

[draconym]

great work everyone hit the bathhouse

[proteusofthehills]

forgot to post this last night

[togetherness23]

ppl talking abt AI in the official youtube channel’s thumbnails made me go check it out. the FIRST thumbnail that showed up i immediately knew was AI bc i am whistles and sneezes no. 1 fan

[citrus-soda]

watching train vids and theres something kinda sweet about seeing people manually sanding the rails for the engines. like awww. somehow reminds me of when you hold a door open for someone. Let me help you on your way.