The NWR

Ask Box is Open! A nice, lovely little retirement home for your engines of lore…maybe. We try to keep it family friendly here but we do have darker themes, albeit it’s at a minimum.

[ye-olde-sodor]

🚂Welcome!☁️

Fan/Suddy | 22 | she/her

This is a TTTE themed side blog for @fan-burns! Here, you'll find many different Aus, headcanons, fanfics, and more!

📬 inbox open!

✅ sfw, but some suggestive stuff may be seen here.

❌Don’t repost my shit! Reblogs encouraged!

✨Master list✨

[duck-and-the-diesel-engine]

Until recently I didn't realize these were the storyboards for Silly Billy

[sufferingfromtrainrot]

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! :)

[ye-olde-sodor]

Thomas, Victor, and the Uninvited Guest (Sodor Syndrome!au)

Thomas dividers by @quacktypewriter

“Victor, I’m telling you it’s somewhere here!”

Thomas stood on the counter, knees wobbling like a gust of wind could take him out at any moment. The lab coat he was wearing echoed every frantic move he made. He held a broom closely to his chest. Victor could only sigh.

“Thomas, what are you talking about?”

“There’s a creature in here!” He shrieked as he darted his head from left to right. “A long wiggly thing!”

“Don’t do that, you’ll hurt your neck!” Victor scoffed. “And what creature? I don’t see anything.”

“I don’t know where it went, but it’s fast, and it absolutely wants to kill us all!”

Victor gripped his arm, “Get off the counter!”

“No, you get on the counter! It could come back at any-“

Before Thomas could finish, he spotted something, and his face contorted into absolute dread. Victor followed his gaze, and copied the engine’s expression. The creature had made itself known as it slithered from under an overturned crate. Its legs were easily in the thousands, yet it never tripped over itself as it glided across the Steamworks floor.

The Steamworks engine shrieked and scrambled onto the counter with Thomas. He cowered behind the shunter as Thomas readied the broom. The creature simply stood there, more interested in the crack in the tile than the two former engines.

“What is that?!” Victor whispered, gripping Thomas’ shoulder.

“I don’t know,” he whispered sharply, “but I think we can kill it.”

“With the broom?”

“With incredible violence. Observe.”

With that warning, Thomas leapt off the counter. The broom arched over his head as he began his (incredibly brief) descent. His feet connected with the ground first, and his body caved into itself unceremoniously not long after. The broom he held decided it was done watching the show, and left Thomas’ hands to join the pile of scrap that was nearby. The creature simply skittered away.

“Oh God, I missed!”

“How?! It was right in front of you!”

“Not anymore!”

Thomas scrambled to his feet, wobbling as the balance slipped from his body. He was still adjusting to having legs. Turning, he saw the creature rush towards the very counter he was perched on.

“Victor-“

“It’s coming this way, isn’t it?”

The creature began to climb the side of the countertop.

“Yes.”

The other engine leapt off the counter and into Thomas’ arms. Incredibly, Thomas was of sound mind enough to catch the other engine, and stumbled as Victor fell into his grasp. No sooner did Victor’s feet hit the ground did the two begin to back away from their old advantage point. The enemy had claimed it as its own, and was staring its advisories down.

“Ok, jumping off a counter with a broom doesn’t work.”

“Correction, arming a blue buffoon with a broom doesn’t work!”

Thomas glared at the other man. “Who are you, Gordon?”

The two focused their eyes on the counter, scanning for the smallest movement as they backed away. Not four seconds later, they bumped into something behind them, and they scrambled to face it.

Sir Topham Hatt look worried. “What’s going on in here? What’s with all the yelling?”

“Sir, we have to leave!” Thomas started, “There’s this horrid little thing crawling about and we can’t get rid of it!”

“What on earth are you on about?”

Thomas and Victor pointed at the counter. “That!”

Sir Topham Hatt squinted, and could just make out the twisting form of the creature. It took him a moment, just one, but once he realized what he was looking at he could only laugh. “That’s not a creature, that’s a centipede!”

The two engines blinked. “A what?”

“A centipede,” Topham repeated, “It looks frightening but it’s completely harmless! Here, watch.”

Thomas raised an eyebrow. “Watch wha-SIR!”

Before either engine could intervene, Sir Topham Hatt waltzed over to the insect and held out his hand. It crawled onto the base of his thumb, and he gently lifted it up. The centipede darted towards his palm as he held it up for the other engines.

“See? Nothing to be afraid of!”

The creature froze in the man's hand, and the two engines could only assume that the rumors around the Hatt family were true. They really were divine. Victor approached the critter.

"So it just...walks around like that? How does it function?"

"Eh, you'll have to ask an expert about that, but think of it like wheels on a locomotive. Especially an American locomotive."

Victor nodded. He knew exactly what he meant.

The stout man waddled towards a nearby window and gently deposited the segmented critter. It was quick to latch onto the brick wall and scurry away, eager to remove itself from the drama inside. As the man made his way back, Thomas was quick to speak.

"Ok, now let's all pray we never see something like that again."

Sir Topham Hatt could only roll his eyes. They're worse than children sometimes. "I told you, they're harmless. I know you are still...adjusting to being small, but if you want any hope of adjusting at all, you need to get used to seeing things like that centipede."

The old engine sighed. "I know sir, it's just...who needs that many legs?! Two is enough, thank you!"

"What about dogs and cows?" Victor chuckled. "They have four!"

"Four is pushing it."

Sir Topham Hatt quickly smirked. "Bees and butterflies have six legs."

"That's also pushing it," he huffed, "as are the two of you."

"Quick, what's a cute animal that has eight legs?" Victor laughed.

"An octopus?" The controller suggested meekly. He knew the creatures were ugly but that was the only other animal he could think of.

Victor and Thomas stared at the other man baffled. "A what?"

Sir Topham Hatt became nervous. "An octopus? Eight limbs? Lives underwater? No bones?"

"No bones?!" Thomas yelled. "I've never heard of such a thing!"

"Thomas, you worked at the docks before, you should know what an octopus is!"

"Working near water doesn't make me a marine biologist!" Thomas argued. "By that logic I should be in your position!"

"How do you know what a marine biologist is but not a bloody octopus?!"

Victor would've added his own comments into the argument, but he was too busy laughing at the two bickering over sea-life. Somehow, he knew this wouldn't be the last time they would have this type of conversation. After all, as Thomas had just demonstrated, their understanding of the human (and animal) world was only just beginning.

Fanfiction won the vote that I posted, so I decided to start small. I keep thinking of how the engines would react to certain bugs if they could see them (since the engines are so large they probably can't see certain bugs) so this came into being. Also this was based off something that happened to me irl lol. I'll have a more lore heavy fanfic for Sodor Syndrome soon.

[rushingexpress]

HEY GUYS pt 2

heyy everyonem its your fav guy posting abt gay trains and being trans AHA i recently talked to my dad about being trans on my birhtday - and it DIDNT go well :))))) he wants me to be comepletely independent and he doesn't want "another man living in the house with him"

Donate to a vunerable trans man moving out of his childhood house, organized by Virgil Melgram

Hi, my name is Virgil - I'm raising funds so I can comfortably … Virgil Melgram needs your support for a vunerable trans man moving out of h

all my shit is currently in bags right now, i'm having another talk with my dad rn but i'll be moving out - please help, share and donate, etc

[ye-olde-sodor]

Virgil I’m so sorry that this happened to you. I can’t imagine the pain that you’ve experienced, but know that you have love and support from us. ❤️ If anyone can send money please do! He’s only at 2% at the time I’m reblogging this!!!

[sodorsteam]

[ye-olde-sodor]

[duck-and-the-diesel-engine]

Important yap session

The last update was on Christmas and I receive new follow notifications to this day. It's also been 5 years since I started the first drafts of DATDE, so not only getting people who still buy the art book but namedropping my comic in passing as their artistic inspiration is actually wild as hell

I want to give this blog a second life by uploading art, old or otherwise (and tag accordingly, for people uninterested in ships or humanized locomotives, for example), so the new tag designated to the webcomic is DATDE. Also, those interested in translating the comic into more languages are always welcome to reach out to me. Thank you for the unprecedented support, it hasn't gone unnoticed

[ye-olde-sodor]

Right so now that the Master List is up, I want to see what everyone is interested in seeing from my aus. There’s a lot of work that’s going to be put into these aus, so being able to narrow it down will help expand them immensely.

So, aside from art, what would everyone be interested in seeing? This isn’t me going back to being stressed about not posting btw. I just need some direction lmao.

What would you like to see from this blod and my aus?

Ask blog (ask certain characters or myself about something)

Fanfiction

Other (list in comments or tags)

Voting ended onMay 3

[ye-olde-sodor]

Totally didn’t forget to reblog the results lmao. I’m working on a small fanfic rn. Thanks for the votes!

[krydd13]

Ms Paint test of the big 3

[ye-olde-sodor]

It’s MerMay you know what that means

Fish✨🦈🐟

Fishman Duck by @asktrio516

[ye-olde-sodor]

Worst people to give “Drink Your Water” PSAs: A Steam Engine.

Gordon: Children, if you don’t drink your water, then you’ll EXPLODE INTO A THOUSAND PIECES AND KILL ANYONE NEARBY-

[ye-olde-sodor]

Right so now that the Master List is up, I want to see what everyone is interested in seeing from my aus. There’s a lot of work that’s going to be put into these aus, so being able to narrow it down will help expand them immensely.

So, aside from art, what would everyone be interested in seeing? This isn’t me going back to being stressed about not posting btw. I just need some direction lmao.

What would you like to see from this blod and my aus?

Ask blog (ask certain characters or myself about something)

Fanfiction

Other (list in comments or tags)

Voting ended onMay 3

[peanutlolxd]

been getting into trains lately

[ye-olde-sodor]

Right so now that the Master List is up, I want to see what everyone is interested in seeing from my aus. There’s a lot of work that’s going to be put into these aus, so being able to narrow it down will help expand them immensely.

So, aside from art, what would everyone be interested in seeing? This isn’t me going back to being stressed about not posting btw. I just need some direction lmao.

What would you like to see from this blod and my aus?

Ask blog (ask certain characters or myself about something)

Fanfiction

Other (list in comments or tags)

Voting ended onMay 3

[ye-olde-sodor]

-Master List-

Murphys Law au:

Basic info

Engine hierarchy

Claw of the Law au:

Basic info

Map of Sodor

Gordon

Sodor Syndrome au:

Basic info

Miscellaneous:

Villain Percy fic

[ye-olde-sodor]

Sodor Syndrome au✨

"Busting buffers, Splodge?" -D10

Series: Post TATMR

Timeframe: 2001

Summary:

Have you ever heard the sound of a set of magic buffers breaking? Splatter has. It’s not pleasant. Gold Dust begins to spread like a disease through the whole island, sparing humans but affecting engines. As the island is placed under lockdown, the engines struggle to continue working without getting infected themselves.

Main Story:

When magic goes wild on the island, human and engine alike get caught in the crossfire. A sneeze could topple a building, roads and rails start to grow like ivy, and Gordon’s Hill gets larger by the day. Engines start getting sick, transforming into large ball jointed dolls. Humans are scrambling to keep the island under control. All of this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Victor and Thomas, two of the first infected, have to work with an infected D10 and Boco to study how the magic works and find a cure before the NWR loses its entire fleet.

Additional Info:

* Lady knows what happened, and while she can’t get to Sodor, she can telephone (flower-phone?) Thomas to keep in touch. She’s working with Burnett Stone to build a new set of buffers to reconnect Sodor and Shining Time, but until then, she’s Thomas’ number 1 guide to magic.

* While D10 knows how magic works., he isn’t an expert. More often than not, he acquires his knowledge from experiments.

* Boco is the Dieselworks manager the same way Victor is the Steamworks manager. The two get along nicely. Thomas and D10 do not.

[sodorinherited]

Crovan's Gate Crew about Thomas: The masterpiece of the workshop. His design was inspired by the multi-purpose E2 series and each of his parts was custom made to create a perfect ratio of speed, strength, and fuel efficiency. The blueprints alone costed thousands and took over a month to finalize.

Crovan's Gate Crew about Percy: Our fat idiot son. He was made in a single afternoon with a budget of 20 bucks. Held together with thoughts, prayers, and like 5 rolls of duct tape. The most pugly pug to ever pug.