More Engine Stories is a book released exclusively by WHSmith, and features five books from the Railway Series.
Introduction
Two things happened in 1951 which has an important effect on railways on the Island of Sodor. The first was a holiday at Yarmouth when my son Christopher and I met a steam-tram engines hauling wagons in the Docks. There and then we decided that Toby the Tram Engine was just what the Fat Controller needed to work his quarry at Ffarquhar.
The second was the formation of the first ever Railway Preservation Society. It was founded to save the narrow Gauge Talyllyn Railwayat Towyn in Wales. I am proud to say that I was among the first hundred members. Christopher and I visited the line regularly, and worked on it, and true stories we collected about it and other narrow gauge railways are told in “Four Little Engines”, “Little Old Engine”, and the Skarloey Railway books.
On the Talyllyn Railway the two old engines “Talyllyn” (No. 1) and “Dolgoch” (No. 2) were soon joined by two others- “Sir Haydn” and “Edward Thomas” which came from another railway recently closed. Likewise two other engines, “Sir Handel” and “Peter Sam” joined our old engines “Skarloey” and “Rheneas” when their former line had been closed too.
It was not long before boys and girls, and their parents too, wrote asking where “Sir Handel” and “Peter Sam” had come from, and what their railway had been like. If you want to know about that, don’t write to me but read the stories of “Duke the Lost Engine” in this volume.
The other stories are about Oliver. If you want to see an “Oliver” at work go either to Didcot Railway Centre on a “steaming day”, or better still to the Dart Valley Railway where, during the summer, an “Oliver” pulls trains between Buckfastleigh and Tones. You will be able to see a “Duck” there too.
I hope you will enjoy this collection of stories as much as the others.
W Awdry
Books
- Toby the Tram Engine
- Four Little Engines
- The Little Old Engine
- Oliver the Western Engine
- Duke the Lost Engine
