Thomas the Tank Engine had humble beginnings as the star of stories that the Rev. Wilbert Awdry told his son Christopher in 1942, when Christopher was sick in bed with the measles. Christopher ...

Rev Awdry was a lifelong train lover ... Britt signed a deal with US television station PBS and in 1989 created a half-hour children’s program called Shining Time Station.

The first was published in 1945. Sodor was based on the Isle of Man, and Rev Awdry drew on his own childhood growing up next to a railway station in the village of Box, Wiltshire. But with ...

Reverend Wilbert Awdry was inspired to write The Railway Series books after hearing trains as he lay in his childhood bed in Wiltshire. Rev Awdry later created Thomas to entertain his young son ...

Mrs Fortnam, 65, said her father Rev W Awdry was the son of a vicar and brought her and her sister and brother up in the traditions of the Church of England. In a letter to The Daily Telegraph Ms ...

The Rev Wilbert Awdry often pointed out the parallels between ... listening to various trains passing through Box station. As he told Sibley years later, the gradient on the approach to Box ...

The Rev W Awdry wrote the first book in The Railway Series in 1945, and a year later became rector at Holy Trinity Church in Elsworth, Cambridgeshire. Cambridge Past, Present & Future put the ...