Annie • She/Her •AuDHD • Aro/Ace • Libra The intention is to post fanart and fanfic...if I can finish something. I have two Thomas the Tank Engine AUs (The Sudric Cycle and Thomas & Friends: Co-Working!) under construction, that should be fun!
Hello everyone! My name is Annie, and I've started this blog (my first Tumblr ever, I'm very excited to finally be here) to enjoy the wonders of everyone's favorite hellsite, and to be a home base for art, fanfic links and world building dumps about two Thomas AUs I've had cooking in my head for years now: The Sudric Cycle and Thomas & Friends: Co-Working!
🛤️The Sudric Cycle
The Sudric Cycle is a decades spanning series of planned fics of various lengths, all about family, family drama, love, legacy, Sudrian history, alternate history, politics, grief, guilt, heartbreak, war...and talking trains.
It's also a means for me to babble on about my headcanons for characters who only exist as names in The Island of Sodor: It's History, People and Railways (If you've ever wanted to read fics featuring Nicola Dreswick, Ranald Drixon, or Sigrid of Arlesdale this is the AU for you!); headcanons about how talking vehicles (known in this universe as "animate vehicles") work, come to be alive, and their effect on the history of mankind; and headcanons about extras from the tv show!
In terms of plot, The Sudric Cycle focuses heavily on the human characters of the Railway Series/Thomas the Tank Engine. At it's core lies the Hatts (Sir Topham, Stephen and Bridget, and Stephen's three kids being the family members we'll spend the most time with). We'll follow them, their relatives, and the North Western Railway through the railway's founding in the 1910s, to a change in leadership in the 1970s, all the way to today, the 2020s!
Along the way, we'll take diversions to look in on characters and events all around the Island of Sodor: the Skarloey Railway, the Culdee Fell, the Arlsdale, the Earls of Sodor, the little villages where the railway doesn't reach, and the world beyond! All in a setting that mixes and combines book and tv lore, locations, and characters.
And the engines, of course, will be going through their own melodramas and hijinx all the while.
The current plan is for The Sudric Cycle to be told over 11 or so fanfictions, of varying length, 10 of which are WIPs, but one of which (The Devil’s Back) is finished. In rough chronological order these are:
• Dreswick's History of the Island of Sodor (a prequel/lorebook written from an in-universe perspective (based on a book mentioned in The Island of Sodor: It's History, People & Railways))
• The Devil’s Back
• The Rise of the House of Hat
• The War and the Railway
• This Machine Kills Fascists
• She Never Married
• Lay My Curses All To Rest
• Eddistone's Daughter, Schenectady's Son
• The Young Controllers
• The Other Railways (an anthology, will jump around the timeline)
• The Three Controllers
(Titles of WIPs are subject to change)
🧙Thomas & Friends: Co-Working!
Co-Working will be another installment in a classic Thomas fandom genre: the humanized AU! I have a lot fewer concrete plans for the overarching plot of this AU, other than that a lot of it be devoted to a retelling of Thomas & The Magic Railroad. It really mostly began as a universe for my humanized engine designs to exist in. Magic will be a big plot element overall in this AU; aside from Lady and her magic being at the center of the TATMR retelling, Co-Working will also feature Proteus, Boulder (yes, I humanized Boulder), and versions of Burnett Stone, the Conductor cousins, and Diesel 10 who are straight up warlocks. I hope you like wizard duels!
‼️Content Note:
Neither The Sudric Cycle nor Thomas & Friends: Co-Working! will cross into out and out NSFW territory, but Reader Discretion Is Advised. Specific content warnings and considerations will be attached to specific posts and in fic descriptions. Overall, expect events depicted to max out at PG-13, but be prepared for character dialogue in fics to reach R. If I ever post something without a specific warning you think should be there, please don't be afraid to let me know!
The Sudric Cycle: What Are Animate Vehicles? 🚂🚗🛳️✈️
Or, The Trains Have Always Been Talking.
One of the big ideas I want to explore in The Sudric Cycle is how history and society would be different if 1) talking vehicles were a normal fact of life and 2) there was an island called Sodor sitting in the Irish Sea.
I plan to discuss Sodor's history (and its relation to the rest of history) in a dedicated fanfiction all about Godred MacHarold and Harold the Black and Arnold de Normanby and all those fun guys, but my ideas about why Thomas and his friends are alive and talking are probably only going to show up as sporadic dialogue references and narration tangents, so I thought a primer on how talking trains work in this AU would make a good first lore dump:
In this AU, talking vehicles are called animate vehicles.
Normal vehicles are called inanimate vehicles, to differentiate them from animate vehicles.
The moment when a vehicle goes from inanimate to animate is called spontaneous vehicular animation (or spontaneous mechanical animation, or just animation or the waking in common parlance). "Spontaneous" here refers to the fact that spontaneous vehicular animation appears to happen completely on its own. In fact, nobody knows why or how it happens! For all of history, even though animate vehicles are a normal feature of life, nobody has figured out the root cause! Not even the vehicles know!
The root cause may not yet be known, but some rules have been observed: not all kinds of vehicles and machines are able to animate. The vehicle needs to be somewhat self-propelled (with unpowered railway rolling stock being the exception here), they need to be built large enough and with enough empty spaces for flesh and organs to spontaneously appear during animation, and they need to be newly constructed (the window for animation is narrow, and once it's gone it's gone).
Above: Age of Sail tall ships and Ancient Greek triremes are two of the kinds of vessels known to have achieved animation though out pre-industrial history.
Now of course, back in the day, people from all over the world came up with beliefs as to why their boats sometimes came alive. They usually chalked it up to supernatural possession or the blessing of a higher power. Later researchers grouped these various spiritual explanations together as the Inhabitance Hypothesis and the Imbuement Hypothesis. The third main hypothesis regarding spontaneous vehicular animation is the Effort Hypothesis. The effort hypothesis first arose during the European Enlightenment as more and more scholarly thought moved away from religious based reasoning. It posits that that humans themselves are the animating force behind why some vehicles waking up. That something of the lifeforce or essence of the shipwrights, designers, and builders goes into the vehicle as it's being constructed. The effort hypothesis is the most popular explanation in the 20th and 21st centuries and is what most characters in the story believe.
Different vehicles animate at different rates. Watercraft and aircraft animate about half the time, cars and cranes animate very, very rarely. Locomotives animate 99.99% percent of the time.
Animate passenger coaches have a 60/40 female/male gender split and nobody knows why. Animate vehicle gender is notoriously impossible to predict otherwise.
Biomechanical Medicine & Assorted Animate Vehicle Health Information:
Biomechanical Medicine, the field of caring for and studying animate vehicles, sits squarely in between the worlds of medicine and mechanical engineering. There are doctors, trained in a medical school environment to primarily tend to a vehicle’s biological features, but Registered Medical Engineers (RME) outnumber them. RMEs are mostly trained to look after a vehicle's machinery, with less training in the biological side. Both the doctors and RMEs typically specialize in one type of vehicle:
A specialist in rail vehicles is called a ferroequinologist, and that subfield is called ferroequinology. 🚂
A specialist in watercraft is called a navisologist, and that subfield is called navisolology. 🛳️
A specialist in aircraft is called an avisologist, and that subfield is called avisology. ✈️
A specialist in automobiles is called a carrusologist, and that subfield is called carrusology. 🚗
When it comes to equipment, traditional mechanical work and biomechanical medicine pretty much share all their tools, but there’s also a significant overlap with large animal veterinary medicine. Those suppliers are the best way of getting tubes and syringes of the right size, and the large amounts of anesthetics that are needed when working on animate vehicles.
Animate vehicles are highly social animals, something they inherited from us if you believe the effort hypothesis.
Animate vehicles wake up with pretty much all their cognitive function, right out of the gate.
An animate vehicle’s language development begins before they wake up. They absorb the language and accent of the people around them as they’re being built. Of course, like humans, they can learn other languages later, and pick up other accents, if exposed to them enough.
It normally takes anywhere from a couple hours to a few days for an animate vehicle to start speaking full words and sentences. They wake up knowing language, but it takes a hot minute for them to figure out how to manipulate their mouths and vocal cords.
An animate vehicle’s ears are hidden and entirely internal.
An animate vehicle can, in fact, die of overwork. This often takes the form of internal hemorrhaging. Other health concerns include rust, metal fatigue, and dry rot.
A locomotive's heart rate and temperature regulation is semi-dependent on if their fire is lit (steam engines) or their motor is running (diesel and electric). They’re much more susceptible to cold when their fire is out or their motors are off. You know how we have a specific resting heart rate? Locomotives have a “lit resting rate”, and an “unlit resting rate” (these terms started out as steam engine specific terms and were also applied, unchanged, to diesel and electric engines once they entered production).
Left motionless, alone and without major stimuli, an animate vehicle will become progressively less aware of their surroundings. This begins with a pronounced amount of brain fog and progresses to full on hibernation. If left this way long enough their biological systems will eventually give out, but this takes many, many years.
Animate vehicles do not have stomachs, but they do have completely internal ears, kind of like a reptile.
Some Things Animate Vehicles Have Changed About The Sudric Cycle's World
In our world there is no consensus for a definition of life, most current definitions in biology are descriptive. Life is considered a characteristic of something that preserves, furthers or reinforces its existence in the given environment. This implies all or most of the following traits:
Homeostasis: regulation of the internal environment to maintain a constant state; for example, sweating to reduce temperature.
Organization: being structurally composed of one or more cells – the basic units of life.
Metabolism: transformation of energy, used to convert chemicals into cellular components and to decompose organic matter. Living things require energy for homeostasis and other activities.
Growth: maintenance of a higher rate of anabolism than catabolism. A growing organism increases in size and structure.
Adaptation: the evolutionary process whereby an organism becomes better able to live in its habitat.
Response to stimuli: such as the contraction of a unicellular organism away from external chemicals, the complex reactions involving all the senses of multicellular organisms, or the motion of the leaves of a plant turning toward the sun (phototropism), and chemotaxis.
Reproduction: the ability to produce new individual organisms, either asexually from a single parent organism or sexually from two parent organisms.
But animate vehicles cannot reproduce by themselves; the only way to make more is for humans to build more, and of course this changes how exactly they fit the requirement of adaptation - all changes being imposed. But they clearly meet all other requirements. In this world, because Animate Vehicles have been with humanity for all of history, their existence is taken into account in all the attempts at defining life, and so reproduction capability never becomes a requirement to be considered a living thing.
As a consequence of the previous point, the debate over viruses is different. In our world, it comes from them needing an outside host cell to be able to duplicate themselves and metabolize. In this world the debate only hangs on the fact they don’t metabolize.
The tradition of referring to all ships as “she” (or “he” in languages where that is the tradition) never developed. Gendered pronouns are reserved for animate watercraft, and inanimate watercraft are merely called “it.” This same rule extends to other vehicles too.
Lots of nautical myths and folklore are different. The Argo is a character in the Argonautica, and the Phaeacian ships in the Odyssey are all alive (though the Odyssey and Argonautica explicitly point this out as strange, suggesting they were written at a time when the Greeks had only recently discovered/recently been introduced to animate ships). The Flying Dutchman is as cursed as his crew.
Lots of famous events from throughout human history are altered, augmented, or even averted by the existence of animate vehicles, but I don't have an exhaustive list of them yet, so imagine away!
So...yeah! This is by no means all of the lore I have floating around my brain (and various Google Docs) about animate vehicles and how they shape the setting, but I think it's the most important of it. This and any more I have to say on the subject outside of fics will all be linked to on an updating, pinned master post. Thanks for reading all of that! :)
yeah making an oc is cool but have you ever fleshed out an obscure, disposable background character from a piece of media so much to the point that it’s effectively your own creation, say for their design or maybe even a name if you’re lucky
Is there a term for this phenomenon? I gotta know.
