Ever since I was a child, I'd heard stories. About a magical land, an island, where dreams come true. Dreams are fleeting. You have them once, they rarely stick with you. Those that do are still ideas trapped in a singular moment of time, unlikely to become reality by the time the means are acquired. But this island is different. It's non-human inhabitants captivated millions through books, and later television. These inhabitants are trains.
Talking trains: engineered, but they live and breathe as we do.
Alive they may be, but like all living things time has its way with them. Time doesn't stand still, as much as we'd like it to. The book series stopped, and the television show changed, relying on make-believe over the real-life accounts of the books. The animation became far removed from the real places and events. In the end, the tales and inhabitants of the Island of Sodor were commodifed and corrupted by their own corporate success.
The real world of Sodor was left behind. No one knows what became of it. As a child, it was my mental escape, and the dream was always that one day I would get there for real. The maps exist, the railways' history was meticulously archived (up to a point). But I feared I missed my chance.
The world has changed, almost unrecognisably so. Mediterranean summers are now the UK's norm. The coasts are flooded, the East Coast eaten away by the frigid cold waters of the North Sea. London has contracted, now home to only the richest of the elite. HS2 has been and gone to little fanfare, mainly used by people trying to get out of London to the Midlands. Bristol, Cardiff, Liverpool and many other cities have been all but abandoned. Transport is now completely electric, too little, too late. Society survives, albeit on the frays of fragility.
No one knows what became of Sodor. All that's known is the people have emigrated, and everything, the railway included, is presumed abandoned. Some engines escaped to the mainland, their curse of survival being the surrender of their sentience. No one travels to or from the island anymore. Stories about the engines have long ceased. Do any still exist on the Island? Too many pressing questions come to me in the dark hours of the morning, replacing the dreams of countryside and the chuffing of colourful locomotives I once had in my formative years. My inner child needs the answers, while I hope the maturity and resilience of my adult form will be enough for the thorny, harsh truths I fear I'll find.
The adventure began in Barrow-in-Furness, Sodor's sole link to what the Sudrians called 'the Other Railway.' Here there once stood a gleaming rolling bridge, bright red in the animated show, that served the railway and the shipping channel that ran beneath it. I stood, gazing over the bridge's decrepit form, a poor indicator of what was to come. The mainland track bed leading to it was still in place, though the rails had been removed from the sections directly in front of the bridge, as if to prevent anything from getting on, or off, the island.
The mellow yellow fields of barrow stretched out either side of me. Rotting fence posts leant at all angles along the edge of what had been the railway line. The bridge itself, named after the nearby settlement of Vicarstown, remained down and flush with the Barrow soils. Flakes of red paint remained tucked into corners too hidden for sunlight and other elements to be fragmented and dislodged. The remainder of the bridge had rusted into a deep crimson red more akin to the shades associated with scrapyards, succumbing to decades out in the wind, rain and sun. All sections seemed to still be in place, though how stable the structure was remained unclear. The looming scaffolded upper section, which raised the bridge, had swayed off-centre, jamming all other mechanistic elements. The two huge counterweights had relented to the alluring pull of gravity, breaking away to embed themselves in the ballast of the rails below, blocking the line. Again, it was unclear if this barrier was accidental, or intentional. Regardless, given the shift towards container shipping and supertankers that needed large, deepened ports, the bridge was a relic of a time when ships were smaller, nimbler and more numerous.
Ballast scraped, shifting with each step I took, the first time it had moved for who knows how long. I walked towards the bridge, eighty litre backpack on my shoulders, the weight shifting as I traversed the uneven rocky road. I had no clue what was waiting for me on the island. Basic provisions were necessary.
My first step onto the bridge loosened flakes of rust. They scratched under my sole with a noise that itched my nerves like a rash. The bridge still felt solid, so I pressed on. Weeds, blown in from the sea breeze, had sprouted in nooks and crannies I wouldn't otherwise have noticed. Gull guano littered every surface. Nature had certainly found a home on the island.
Edging round the counterweights, my feet planted onto Sodor soil for the first time. A dream fulfilled. My curiosity fully awakened, and my senses heightened in ways new to me. The air smelt different. An industrial, burnt aroma lingered all these decades later. Maybe it was real, or my mind was filling in the blanks with what I expected or hoped to find. I pulled out my map, figuring I was on the far east point of the main line. Following the tracks would lead me to the biggest station on the island: Vicarstown. It was about three kilometres by rail, easily walkable. I aimed to hunker down there for the night, to scrounge around and get a feel for the state of the Island. If anyone remained, it would be there, and they could help fill me in on what exactly happened here after the planet succumbed to climate change.
I walked on, mulling over what was likely the case. The phasing out of the household coal market in the UK impacted heritage railways, but Sodor's rail network relied on coal, and to a lesser extent diesel. All coal alternatives, wood pellets and the like, wouldn't have been voluminous enough, or efficient enough, to uphold a network of this size. Even if Sodor went to the UK government, appealing for rights to be their own sovereign region or nation, there were no guarantees their case would be successful. But would people rather abandon their island, frozen in time for so long, or modernise it, removing all the endearing quaint qualities that people on the mainland loved and were jealous of? Something else had to be at work.
The fields on either side of the line gave way to retaining walls. Lichen and ivy snaked green across the red bricks. Soon the elevation of the surrounding countryside dipped and the great settlement of Vicarstown sprawled across the lands below as the tracked became a viaduct. Up ahead loomed the big station, tall and grandiose in the environment, even after all these years.
The height of the station entrance's arches dazzled me as I walked up the lines into the station itself. The central pillars were a scale of stone-and-mortar architecture rarely seen anymore, except perhaps at St Pancras or Temple Meads. Windows were shattered or covered in so much grime that they were opaque. Most of the green scaffolding supporting the roof remained in place, though a couple of sections had loosened, hanging in precarious positions high above me. There were no trains or humans in sight.
I clambered up onto the platforms, a place I'd always put myself in my dreams. The trains would come and go, stop and talk, fuss about with the passengers and each other. But the place was deserted, except for the cold wind that seemed to creep into my sleeves and neck.
There was so much we never saw in book illustrations beyond the edges of the page. Ropes and ropestands still anticipated queues of passengers. I walked up to the ticket counter. All positions were locked shut, layered in dust. A small board sat in the centre of the counter:
'THE NWR IS CEASING OPERATONS WITH IMMEDIATE EFFECT'
No explanation or elaboration, only more cryptic evidence something had gone awry.
I walked down the steps of the station entrance, a miniature-yet-grand archway with small, human-sized glass doors. Towards what was the taxi bay, the cobbled road had withstood the test of time. There were no vehicles to commandeer; finding a working car would really speed up my exploration. Alas, it was unlikely.
The steady slope of cobbled road led down to a crossroads junction, where a set of tram lines headed off to my left and right. I'd noticed these in the show, though we never saw anything run on them. A section further down the line was flooded, while the other direction had snapped electrical lines. The lines heading to the East would yield no insight. All that laid that way was the coast. I decided to track the lines as they headed West, curving round to the north as they slipped under the viaducts. I saw flashes of Henry crashing and hanging over the road in this very spot. A vivid, real vision, but exagerratively animated so therefore questionable in its historical accuracy . However, the structure, the city layout and architecture all matched the animated set. Maybe there was more truth to those later absurdities than I gave credit.
The tramlines curved back West, rising up into the countryside to track level, joining the main line at a junction. From there a single railway line split off at a set of points, curving North. I had a sneaky suspicion of where they went.
The sky overhead was drawing one of the famous Sodor sunsets. Dabbles of blue, orange and pink bled together in the pearl-white clouds that slipped through the heavens . If the buildings I was hoping to find on this line remained, it would offer the perfect place to spend the night.
It still stood, all these years later. A red roundhouse, five berths, with tracks stemming from the central turntable. To the left was a pond where a certain big blue engine had once slipped off the rails. The waters had risen, spilling out to fill the turntable well. The turntable bridge had rusted, partially collapsing on one side. Bullrushes had sprouted around the rim. All surrounding sidings were desolate.
I approached the roundhouse. Wooden doors had rotten at the hinges and collapsed in most of the berths, except the one at the far end. Slate roof tiles, smashed and broken, littered the ballast. Suddenly the prospect of darkness inside massaged anxieties and worries on my mind. I cursed myself for not bringing along any weapons, for defensive purposes. The naivety of my inner child still hoped for Sodor to be this magical place, almost devoid of crime and the squalid illness of mankind so prevalent and obvious in the rest of the world. Now though, given the decomposing state of things, I wasn't sure what lurked behind even the most familiar of childhood fantasies.
Bending down, I grabbed a shard of slate, broken to a sharp point by its fall at some point in the past. I crept closer to the dark interior of the roundhouse, reaching the doorway of the central birth. Falling into alignment with the wall, I took a moment to control my breathing, closing my eyes. Holding in that current breath, I swung into the open, head racing to survey the interior.
Emptiness, relief, disappointment. Ambivalence of all three feelings. Nothing seemed amiss, except for the lack of anything recognisable beyond the standing structure.
"Hello?" a voice echoed amongst the brickwork.
Female, louder than a normal human, even without the assistance of echo. Frozen, my ears raced to trace the source. It had been uttered, spoken more like a question than a greeting.
I spun. The locked birth. Shrouded by the deeper shadows of the roundhouse, the vague outline of an engine appeared before my readjusted eyes. For the first time, my eyes were resting on a Sodor engine. Alive. Talking, Real.
Perhaps there was something left after all.