#ttte large and in charge

[damnea]

Happy Birthday, Sir!

I know some people don't care for the CGI stuff, but this episode just feels like such a strong one.

I get the feeling this ones been talked about to death, but I can't help myself mentioning it.

Everyone has to have seen this episode at least once by now, but if you haven't it's called 'Happy Birthday, Sir!'

I love this one specifically because theres a flashback sequence in it when the Fat Controller and Edward were younger. Someone dared to add layers to side characters, give them a raise.

Why this episode sticks with me -

The Fat Controller is a very busy man, but every year on his birthday he always makes time to ride in his special carriage and visit the stations with Edward.

When Thomas and Winston hear the story they're just so enraptured by it, even Cranky stops to listen in.

The older engine begins to reminisce.

"He loved riding in that carriage. I remember his smile, it would light up the sky " - Edward CGI.

I like to think that Edward's happiest moments of those he shares with others. So this feels very special.

The thing is though.

We don't know exactly why the carriage means as much as it does, other than the fact that he just likes going for rides in it on his birthday.

I think.

It's a family tradition that he wants to keep going, one that he might have shared with his father.

Every year his father would take him out in the open topped carriage and they'd tour the island to see the sights. It's all very Lion King.

---

"Look, Bertrum. Everything the rail touches is our kingdom."

"Even Misty Island?"

"Let's just try to enjoy the carriage ride."

---

The railway is his father's legacy.

It's reassuring for him to know that everything his father worked so hard for is still going to plan. No confusion or delay.

And even when things aren't quite going to plan and change is overbearing, Edward is more than enough of a reassuring prescence.

When you take up the mantle of The Fat Controller, you know you have big shoes to fill.

#this felt nice to talk about #its probably been done to death #but it stands out to me so much #ttte edward #ttte large and in charge #its older than edward innit so it could be a very special piece that another engine pulled #just one of my favourite episodes

[nickywhoisi]

Okay, now I would like to put in my general headcannons and worldbuilding for my envisioning of humanoid!TTTE Let's go!

ALL THE ENGINES

Their body types are human, but their bodies are made of solid metal and iron, all the things that make up a train would be utilized/rekajiggered into anatomically correct versions of body parts. I wouldn't really know the specifics of that because I'm not a train expert orz There are slight lines that they all have on their exterior bodies which imply jointwork and plating, but the rest stretches and bends as if it were flesh. Their inner bodies also have a main gut/stomach that is their furnace, and it remains unchanged in how that works, just that the engines can eat coal and stuff exclusively with their mouths.

They are ONLY humanoid, this universe does not have engine forms to go into as they are already like mini giants...giving them a train form wouldn't actually work out as well, since they would be way too large to fit on the tracks! I know, doesn't seem to make sense for a train fandom, and the fact that these golem people seem to work as the trains but dress up as drivers, yet they have no trains to fit into? uhhhhh just consider this a fledgling universe for now I'll work out the kinks maybe retcon things if it doesn't work so well it's still in the drafts uhhhhhh shit whaddo i do now

The sizes and shapes of how they are in canon translates to their body types in this universe. For example, Percy is a small engine, so he would be little, but Skarloey and any other engine smaller than him would be even tinier. And while the squatter you are to your own golemy kind isn't so neat, they are on average 7 to 8ft. So if you were 6 or 5, then you would be within normal human size anyway! But it seems like the bigger you are, the wider reach you may have, which is more favourable in their culture. Not so much about height as it is about the most capability; being useful. The tender engines would have larger frames, very thick and muscular like Henry or Gordon, or they can be slender and athletic like James or Edward. Then the diesels would be large too, but also with a stockier shape to reflect their overall square shape feeling.

The steam-diesel rivalry still exists of course, but it's a little harder for the untrained eye to tell who is what type of golem. The only way to spot the difference is when they're so mad they're physically fuming about something; steamies blow usual puffs of steam, diesels blow out their dark chemical smog. And electric? I was gonna say nothing, but the idea that they produce small electric charges around their heads is way more interesting! I don't remember if anybody said there were electric train characters, but just to be inclusive and just to be sure...

Almost all of the story beats from the model series is what I infuse the most of into my rendition of the cast. Of course it's not limited to, as I'd love to find inspiration from the railway books and cgi series, it's just that I've only ever experienced the model show and movie. So I guess that would be the Britt and HiT era? They are basically them, but with leggy to stand up. and arms to finally hug trees and hold up mirrors isn't that right henry n james hoohoohoo

The Magic Railroad story exists here as a "world arc", but possibly with different human characters (I am inspired by the cryptic but grounded old man from Blue Snowplow's Hawin the Lost Blue Engine mystery thriller series. Go have a watch it's really good!), and after that biz, Lady and D10 would be mainstays. Because I grew up with that dorky little movie. Speaking of, I really prefer the characterization of the engines from the amazing movie parody by MrConductorFan1406, give that a watch too, it's such an adorable love letter that will also leave you in laughing fits. In fact, it was the very first Thomas movie I ever knew about, so it's special to me. So I emulate a bit of their personalities into my verse's version. While Lady is less involved than others, D10 takes a very active approach to a lot of things. He does not actually stop trying to destroy Lady's magic, he's just plotting how to do it and biding his time.

will add more to this post later, I am sadly getting sleepy...why body must you betray me at my finest hour...at least when I typed this last night, but now I am still bleary like that and I have to work hard at things today. dear god it never ends.

#I try to sleep and get kept awake #now I try so hard not to and succumb #fuck my body for real #ramble brambles #ttte #my writings

[joezworld]

📁

Specifically, any headcanons of the Sodor Engines interacting with the internet, or the internet in general?

For some reason, I’d imagine that podcasts and the like are popular among vehicles in general.

That is a question that I've been working on for some time - because I'm workshopping my own Tornado headcanon (and boy oh boy does she use the internet a lot) - but I have some ideas for the Sodor engines as well: 

Henry is probably the most "plugged in" engine on the island, weirdly enough. One of his drivers gave him an iPod back in the early 2000s, and kindly preloaded it with a bunch of torrented music.

 BTW, that works because all the engines are now equipped with automatic train warning systems, and the little on-board computer has a USB port - as a nice side effect it allows music players to work with the engines in the same way as bone-conducting headphones do. The computer also acts as some kind of computer interface, which I am not going to explain how that works because Jesus Christ I don’t know how it does either.  

 Henry has managed to upgrade his iPod a few times since thanks to hand-me-down units from NWR staff, so he eventually got his buffers on a wifi-enabled iPod Touch and now downloads new music from the station wifi. He does listen to podcasts, but as every other engine will tell you, you could show Henry ten thousand new and exciting songs from the best artists in the world, and his top ten played songs are still going to be Genesis, Phil Collins, and Yes. Bear considers it a win that he managed to convince Henry to regularly listen to Rush after a mere twenty years of convincing. 

 Mavis and Daisy listen to a very interesting program called The News, because as stated elsewhere, they invest a shitload of money and need to be on top of things. Thomas and Percy wish that Daisy would use headphones or something similar to that, instead of listening to Bloomberg TV at loud volumes in the middle of the night. Toby frankly doesn’t mind, as it’s very nice to be kept up-to-date on the outside world.  

In a move that surprises no-one, Bill and Ben have a podcast where they talk about whatever they think about at that moment - usually horse-racing, investing, and clay mining. As such, they have a wide audience, almost none of whom know that they’re that Bill and Ben, as their podcast is audio-only.  

 In an also unsurprising move, Edward and BoCo have been made very much aware that Bill and Ben have a podcast, but are still unsure as to what the hell a podcast is, despite being frequent guests on it.  

Of the main line diesels, only Bear has shown any real interest in the internet, and was immediately put in charge of the Amazon Alexa when a unit was installed in the diesel shed. He also has an iPod that he got for Christmas a few years back. (The NWR has a very good personal  electronics recycling program called give it to Henry, he’ll make use it.)  

Bear does listen to podcasts as well as music, but his choices are so insufferably boring that even Henry refuses to listen to them. (I don’t really listen to podcasts - despite making one - so insert the most boring podcast you can think of here.) 

 As for other internet uses... 

Gordon is very up-to-date on the newest social media trends - somehow - but only really cares when he is involved. He won’t admit it, but he’s been trying to figure out how to work a camera/selfie stick for some time so he can start up his own Instagram account. So far he has been unsuccessful, but one day he will manage it. 

 James has had an ongoing feud with his own Wikipedia page for about a decade now. The article sourced most of its information about his construction off of some out-of-print book about the L&Y. The book in question is accurate about James’ class, but not James himself - as he was a prototype engine. There’s no other primary sources available, so the very dedicated Wikipedia mod who created the page won’t change it - no matter how much James complains that he was there! He knows what happened! 

Every now and again a TTTE fan blog/tumblr will make a post about hypothetical “ships” of the Sodor engines. Most of the time it’s shipping the core characters like Gordon and Henry, much to Gordon’s bafflement and Henry’s amusement! 

Only one blog (a ttte fan tumblr by the curious name of @mean-scarlet-deceiver  ) has gotten it right. Henry actually reached out to congratulate this blogger, but was unfortunately mistaken for a very dedicated roleplay account.  

James is very annoyed by these blogs, as they have never once correctly guessed who he is “shipped” with! He has tried several times to be seen in public with Delta, but these events have never gone as planned - the “best” instance is when Edward rolled by at exactly the wrong moment, leading to months of speculation that JamesxEdward was the ship to look out for! 

Thomas, being a generally oblivious sort of engine, was totally unaware of the online fan community around the TV show until he started getting actively harassed by vloggers and Instagrammers in the early 2010s. He’s fine with it now, but it was a deeply unusual experience for most of 2012.  

Toby has developed an unexpectedly popular following on social media following his collab with Stormzy. His official twitter is huge now, with over a million followers, even if he has no idea what to do with it. He posts rarely, but usually manages to make an incredible post when he does.

No-one is sure who told Oliver what a “fan-production” is, but if you manage to get ahold of him for any period of time and ask him nicely, he will lend his voice to your TTTE fan-project, so long as it isn’t about [INSERT TERRIBLE SOCIAL/POLITICAL VIEW(S) HERE]. This means that he has 100% voiced dramatic readings of NSFW Fanfics before, which is always an absolute riot to spring on people unannounced.

There is a series of slice-of-life TTTE fanfics on Ao3 that have been written with such accuracy and innate railway knowledge that people are sure it was written by a Sodor engine, but nobody knows which one.

The Culdee Fell Railway has very active Instagram, Twitter and YouTube accounts, with all of the engines and coaches showing up regularly. It’s about the closest any of the railways on Sodor have come to what those outside the UK would call “normal locomotive social media”.

The Skarloey Railway has social media accounts too, but they don’t really feature the engines in any meaningful way, instead being used as a normal service announcements page.  

 The SR is a real working railway that doesn’t rely on tourism money as much as the others do, so they get a bit of a pass here.  

 The Arlesdale Railway has Twitter and YouTube, which didn’t usually get a lot of hits until 2020, when Ivan and Amanda Farrier started badgering the staff to make some videos just to alleviate some boredom. So far the most popular videos on the channel are a front-mounted camera video of the entire line slow-tv style, Bert explaining how steam engines work, and a video of Mike complaining about Justin Bieber for a solid half-hour.  

 That’s about it as far as Sodor goes, but before we’re done, I want to take a moment to talk about Tornado, because I have some fun ideas for her... 

First of all, we need to establish that Tornado is very young. Her construction only started in late 90′s, and she was steamed to life in 2000, putting her firmly into the “Zoomer” category. Add in the fact that she was built by a bunch of old men who didn’t really know how to treat a new engine, and she was raised much more like a human than a locomotive - I’ll get to this much more in the proper Tornado Headcanon post, but what this means here is that when social media started being a thing in the mid-to-late 2000′s, the people at the A1 Trust decided that they needed a young person to run things like Twitter, Facebook, and Myspace... and, well, Tornado was the youngest person in the trust by a large margin.

I should state here that in the rest of the world, locomotives are on the internet at roughly the same level as humans are, so there’s plenty of equipment to connect a phone/computer/camera to an engine - being English, the A1 Trust didn’t know how common it was, but they managed to get it up and running just the same.

 So Tornado has very quickly become attuned to the internet, just like any other teenager would. (yes, let’s let that settle into our minds for a moment - Tornado is barely old enough to drink in the US!) Quite naturally that means that she knows social media inside and out, and is actually quite a proficient social media manager for the trust, managing all of their social pages. More than one person who has complained about the trust on twitter has unknowingly been complaining to Tornado herself! 

 “On the internet, nobody knows that you’re a dog Engine”. 

 Tornado has her own personal social media accounts too, but most/all of the time she gets mistaken for a very dedicated role-player, as the general perception of British Locomotives is that they don’t tweet. This has resulted in some amazing reactions from podcast hosts (because, as you might expect, Tornado is very knowledgeable about steam traction in the 21st century, and tweets about it often, so train podcasts want to talk to her) when she gets invited onto video calls, turns on her webcam, and is met with screams from people who suddenly realize that her profile picture is accurate.  

 By far the best instance of this is when she was invited onto a video call with a railfan podcast. She was at the NRM at the time and managed to convince them to let her use their Skype setup. A wide-angle lens was needed because she was on the turntable in the Great Hall, so that podcast quickly got sidetracked when her webcam was turned on and revealed Tornado, with Mallard, Evening Star, City of Truro, and Green Arrow visible behind her. Whatever the original topic was quickly got thrown out in favor of a 2-hour Q&A with some of the most famous engines in the UK. 

#ask response #the internet #ttte thomas #ttte toby #ttte bill and ben #ttte gordon #ttte daisy #ttte mavis #ttte henry #ttte bear #ttte oliver #tornado #nrm #trains using the internet #ttte #sodor #sodor shenangians #the formatting on this one is super fucked up and i can't figure out how to fix it - sorry