Thread by @lavietidhar

Sodor... shit. I'm only in Sodor. Every time, I think I'm gonna wake up back on the train tracks. I'm here a week now. Waiting for a mission. Getting softer. And every minute Thomas runs the rails he gets stronger.

Everyone gets everything he wants. I wanted a mission. And for my sins, they gave me one.

I was going to the worst place in the world, and I didn't even know it yet. Weeks away and hundreds of miles tracks that snaked through the war like a circuit cable...plugged straight into the Fat Controller's brain.

The Fat Controller... he graduated top of his class at West Point. Expert on locomotives. They said under his power the trains on Sodor *always* arrived on time. Say what you want about him but he kept the trains running...

"I watched a small train, crawling on the edge of a straight razor. That's my dream. It's my nightmare. Crawling, slithering, along the edge of a straight razor, and surviving."

He's out there operating without any decent restraint, totally beyond the pale of any acceptable human conduct. We want you to terminate the Fat Controller's command. Terminate... at the final station.

They weren't even human, I thought. They were steam trains. Charging a man with murder on Sodor was like blaming the wrong type of leaves on the track. I took the mission. What the hell else was I gonna do?

But I really didn't know what I'd do when I found him.

I got an old locomotive to ferry me up-track. One of ours, a Diesel. Only problem was, I wasn't alone. The crew were mostly just kids. Rock 'n' rollers with one foot in their graves.

The engine driver, the one they called Wilbert, was from the nearby Isle of Man. He was wrapped too tight for Sodor. Probably too tight for the Isle of Man.

Old Bailey was a famous hobo from the tracks of Candy Mountain. To look at him, you wouldn't believe he's ever fired a weapon in his life.

Mr. Bubbles was from some Southampton shit-hole, and I think the light and the space of Sodor really put the zap on his head.

Then there was Joe, the Captain. It might have been my mission, but it sure as shit was Captain Joe's locomotive.

The Fat Controller had an impressive career. Maybe too impressive. I mean, perfect. He was being groomed for one of the top slots in the railway corporation. General manager, chief of staff, anything.

Sodor changed him. It made him into something as hard and as powerful as a train engine. It wasn't long before he came clear off the tracks... but by then it was too late.

Wasn't long before I saw smoke ahead. Black smoke, like the corpses of old steam engines burning.

But it wasn't Thomas. Not yet. Thomas was patient, Thomas squatted out there on the island, deep where the railtracks ran, where there weren't any people. Thomas went rogue a long time ago.

It was Topham Hatt and his boys. The Diesel cavalry. They'd made him a colonel by then. They must have hit the old steamers hard. There were broken trains everywhere and a guy filming the action for the people back home.

BBC, I thought. Maybe a Cbeebies re-run. They were all over the place, but no one wanted to know the truth about the war. Not anymore.

They were supposed to escort us past the Tidmouth Sheds. Thomas' Point. It was hairy out there.

Topham Hatt had it pretty good to himself. They freighted beef up from the mainland and rode the rails like hobos on vacation. But the more they tried to make it like home, the more they made everybody miss it.

It was Thomas' point but it was Topham Hatt's turf, and everyone knew Thomas don't train hop. The old shut-doors were mostly gone, deep in their hidden depos, and the new electrics weren't worth shit.

...
later.
we were attacked by feral conductors out past Brendon Docks.
Never get off the train, Wilbert said. But the Fat Controlled had gone off the rails, he split from the whole damn timetable.

The company tried one last time to bring him back into the fold. And if he'd pulled back to station, it would have been forgotten. But he just kept on running. And he kept winning it his way.

...
Later.
Maithwaite Station. Talk about a vision of hell.
The Troublesome Trucks have been through there and whoever was left alive there was no one in charge.

We lost Mr Bubbles to a faulty signal.

I can still see that awful red light.

By the time we crawled into the Ulfstead Castle depot there were only two of us left.

The trains were waiting silently. Thomas, Gordon, Percy. The rest of them. They parted to let us in. They knew we had nowhere else to go, by then.

They had one crazed human pet. Called himself the Duke of Boxford.

"Watch out for the Choo-Choos," he said. "And watch out for the Fat Controller, he is a poet-warrior of the classical kind."

But his methods were unsound. He'd forgotten trains are there to carry people. The Fat Controller wanted Sodor to become a paradise for trains. All he had to do was get rid of the passengers.

I wanted to tell him London Transport have been doing a good job of that just by raising prices all the time and turning everything into a rail replacement bus service.

But he was beyond reasoning with, then. And he hated Oysters.

They took me to see him. It smelled like a slow derailment in there. Sweating bodies and too much perfume and and nightmares, like the last train home on a Friday night. This was the end of the track, all right.

He *wanted* me to kill him.

He was no longer even in possession of a valid travel ticket.

"I saw things," he told me. "The real horror. The wrong kind of leaves on the track. The wrong kind of snow. Rail replacement bus services. I was on the Circle Line once. The horror of it sticks to you like napalm."

"I saw the price of a train ticket from London to Cambridge. Things you wouldn't believe. Virgin trains. I could go on. Tourists talking on public transport. Talking! I saw travel cards go up to over twelve pounds for a day card."

"I saw the queues for the London Transport Museum on a Bank Holiday Monday."

I couldn't do it. It would have been too cruel to make him go back. He was happy there, with the old steam trains. I stayed with him as he ranted and raved. He thought if only he held on long enough they'd renationalise the railway.

When he was gone I just stood there and watched them go. The wild locomotives. Thomas, Charlie, Scruff. The steam clung to their boxy old frames and hid them in the fog. I wished them well.

Then I boarded the 4:40 to Waterloo; but, of course, the station was closed.

END.