Edward the Blue Engine and the Furness Railway

Thomas the Tank Engine's Isle of Sodor was connected to the mainland by a railway bridge across a narrow channel and over Walney Island to Barrow-in-Furness ... where it connected with the Furness Railway! This was only about eight miles from Swarthmoor Hall, incidentally.

Here's a map drawn by Rev. W. Awdry in 1958, along with more information about the Isle of Sodor and the Furness area.

Strangely, the Island of Sodor does not show up on this more recent map.

Wikipedia gives a surprising amount of additional information on the history of connecting Sodor to the Mainland.

The engines of the Isle of Sodor are all (more-or-less) based on real British prototypes. The story of how this came to be is somewhat peculiar: Rev. W. Awdry had not initially intended them to look like realistic locomotives at all! His first illustrator, Reginald Payne, decided to make Thomas an LBSCR E2 class tank engine, an idea which surprised Awdry but quickly won him over. Subsequent books had a different illustrator, C. Reginald Dalby, who was less interested in realism; while he continued to use Payne's design for Thomas, engines introduced later were often less historically rendered. Awdry eventually became so enthusiastic about prototypical bases for his engines that he and Dalby quarrelled over the matter, and eventually Awdry wrote Henry (originally drawn with no prototype) into a major accident so he could be rebuilt with a different (realistic) appearance more to Awdry's liking! A thorough history, including backgrounds for every engine, has been written online by Martin Clutterbuck.

It turns out that Edward (who was always my favorite engine) is based on a Furness Railway prototype! Dalby's likeness is imperfect, but Awdry stated clearly that Edward was a "modified" Sharp-Stewart class K-2 "Larger Seagull". The "Larger Seagulls" were delivered to the Furness Railway in 1896 and served into the grouping era (until about 1930).

The Hornby's likeness to the prototype isn't all that close, such that converting a model of Edward into a Furness Larger Seagull would be wholly impractical, but Edward himself might occasionally pay a visit to his home turf on the mainland!

In September 2007, three more Furness Railway characters were introduced to the world of Thomas the Tank Engine in the new book Thomas and Victoria! This is the first new Thomas book in ten years. It's written by Christopher Awdry (son of Rev. W. Awdry), who had authored fourteen books in the series before his father's death in 1997 but none since. The new book "focuses on stories relating to the railway preservation movement".

Thomas and Victoria doesn't appear to be available at Amazon.com yet (as of 2 Jan 2008), but it is available from Amazon.co.uk.

Victoria is an old Furness Railway coach (pictured on the book cover, being pulled by Edward). Thomas's driver discovers her being used as "a summerhouse in a garden", and she is restored and added to the Quarry line (pulled by the tram Toby with his old coach Henrietta). This is almost certainly based on the Furness Railway Trust's rescuing of their North London Railway Guards and Luggage Van--before it was discovered by a chance conversation (and kindly donated by its owner to the Furness Railway Trust), "for the past 8 decades it ha[d] been a summerhouse, a shed and even a spare bedroom in a garden in Shirley!"

The prototype for Victoria is probably the Furness Railway Trust's restored North London Railway 2nd Class Coach. (It has five doors instead of Victoria's four, but both are four-wheel coaches of that era connected through restoration with the Furness Railway.) There's the small matter of colour difference, though....

In a story about her days on the Furness Railway, we learn she ran with a sister coach Helena, and that their engine was Albert, "a red Furness Railway J1 2-4-2 tank engine [as rebuilt in 1891] with a yellow FR on him" who ran on what is now the Lakeside & Haverthwaite heritage railway. It's unclear from the available summaries whether Albert and Helena are around in any form in the present day.

Finally, here's a tribute to Edward, with images of just about everything currently on the market: