#the furness and midland engines who are said to have been loaned in the early years were not air-braked

[mean-scarlet-deceiver]

Why the hell is Thomas, supposedly a LB&SCR engine, on Sodor?

That's a long trek! Plus, E2s are way bigger than Thomas is portrayed in every iteration of canon!

The second thing can be explained away as "major rebuild" (I suppose—it's still weird), but the first is a pretty big strain on belief.

Here are some of the options:

Thomas was being sent to the front but his ship called at Tidmouth and his crew just rolled him right off into the docks. The NWR was in a state of half-built chaos and desperately needed engines, so no one questioned too hard what tf Thomas and his crew were doing hanging 'round so long as they were making themselves useful.

Young Thomas stowed away on a long-distance train out of his home depot wanting to see the world and/or show up whatever engines were currently teasing him. He managed to finagle odd jobs in the chaos of war preparation until he wound up on Sodor.

STH is plain lying about Thomas being an E2. It's an amazing bit of cheek. I'm thinking in this case Thomas is something close and handy, maybe a Johnson 2411 class or a contractor engine, and when his owners tracked him down to Vicarstown FC1 just bald-facedly claimed that this was an LB&SCR engine that had been sent to them for war service, sorry about your lost engine, if you have any posters we're happy to put them up. They were infuriated but Thomas had already been modded so much that they couldn't prove his identity.

Bonus to that: STH made it legal with the LB&SCR, who knew there were shenanigans afoot but who just shrugged and accepted his five hundred pounds or whatever for an engine they knew very well they hadn't lost.

Variant: There is also the @tethrendevez explanation!

For the "lying to his owners" theory I did not propose the obvious alt of Thomas as a Furness G5, if only because I can't see even FC1 having the chutzpah to try gaslighting his next-door neighbors. But consider: Thomas was a G5, but in 1960 he was embiggened in the post-breakfast rebuild. FC2 decided to have him rebuilt to look like a somewhat plausible LB&SCR E2... so that they could request that BR send one or two of these soon-to-be-withdrawn engines to them gratis for Thomas's "spare parts." The beaten, frightened engines arrived to find their mysterious long-lost brother was... just some northern sidetank rando winking at them and saying that he hoped they didn't mind being rushed off their wheels at their new assignments!

The North Western was one of the odd railways that were then air-braked, so when the Admiralty decided they needed to be loaned locomotives they sent some engines from railways like the LB&SCR that would be compatible with their stock.

Bonus to the above: Annie, Clarabel, and probably similar coaches were also donated during this time, being themselves air-fitted.

Thanks to @joezworld for helping spark this post.

#the furness and midland engines who are said to have been loaned in the early years were not air-braked #it's possible they had to be sent with dedicated coaches and trucks? #that was the start of sodor's transition to vacuum? #alternately these loaners could have been modded to be air-braked #the railway series #this is ttte #thomas the tank engine #ttte thomas #the fat controller #ttte heaadcanon #ttte analysis #ttte lore