Thomas and Friends: The Adventure Begins

How Thomas Came to Be

Thomas the Tank Engine, whose story proved the impossible that even the small and weak can do big and strong things, is only one of the many famous locomotives in the saga of rail transportation. As late as the 18th century, trains were pulled by horses instead of steam engines, which did not exist around this time. English inventor Thomas Newcomen created the world's first pumping engine, used to extract water from mines. Of it's conception he noted: "I had not walked further than the Golf-house when the whole thing was arranged in my mind." With the rise of the Industrial Revolution from 1760 to 1840, the introduction of the Bessemer process allowed steel to be made inexpensively, building long lasting steel rails through rampant diseases and unpredictable conditions of nature.

The world was harsh, but the rails were getting longer. Stocks, mail and passengers from different sides of Britain and America were increasing. By the late 1860s, rail travel had greatly improved to meet these needs with the development of the first high pressure steam locomotive Catch me who can built by Richard Trevithick in 1808. While shipbuilders aimed for comfort, style and speed to take less time in transatlantic crossings, a Northumberland engineer named George Stephenson formed the Liverpool and Manchester Railway in 1830. Pioneer promoter William James, arraigned and surveyed the route along with Stephenson's son Robert and iron founder William Losh with one main stipulation: they would hold a contest to see which type of engines would prove useful to work on the line, partly organized by the board of directors. Five innovative steam locomotives competed for the new railway and Stephenson's Rocket was the last to enter and he completed the Rainhill Trials on October 8th, 1829.

Trains and ocean liners were built for a new type of passenger who could afford them. In their world, a woman could be seen at a formal dinner party in a $1,000 diamond necklace and elegant meals were served entirely onboard yachts and special carriages called buffet cars. The nouveau riche found it's style during the Victorian era, a name given by historians and authors describing the culture and society of Queen Victoria's reign from 1837 to 1901. The western and eastern worlds were secure, prosperous and industrialized in the years following the American Revolution and the Crimean War known as Pax Britannica or in America, "the Gilded Age". Poverty was still everywhere, but the middle class enjoyed leisure time while the upper class began to flaunt their wealth. The great minds of science, stories, technology, geology, politics and business, including Charles Darwin, Rudyard Kipling, James Joseph Sylvester, Jefferson Davis, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, J. P. Morgan, Grenville Dodge and even Oakes Ames accelerated the industrial beat of progress over the gentle rhythms of nature to see results that are larger than life...and very few of them thought about the consequences.

During the reign of Queen Victoria and her son King Edward VII, bigger certainly is better in the world of commerce between shipbuilders and rail construction. The increasing trade of immigration aboard ships also allowed train carriages to accommodate third class, the modest working second class and the thrill seeking first class to their selected ships in docks and harbour ports known as boat trains. On July 27, 1846, an Act of Parliament amalgamated five railway companies into the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway, it's first locomotives drawn from a collection by superintendent John Chester Craven who built up the necessary facilities for the new railway to allow the company in building their own line of locomotives at Brighton Works. Their first constructed class of locomotive was a 2-2-2 called Jenny Lind after the Swedish soprano singer. 24 tons in total would reach a speed of 43 mph crossing the railway route within an hour or two, leaving it's chief rival companies, the London and South Western Railway and the South Eastern and Chatham Railway up for the challenge.

Even after the death of King Edward in 1910, not everything had been optimistic in the industrial race of the twentieth century. A year after his death in 1911, the Ottoman Empire and the Kingdom of Italy waged war on what would be the first aerial bombardment by airplanes and airships known as the Italo-Turkish War. That same year, the White Star Line built RMS Titanic, a huge ocean liner that struck a North Atlantic iceberg on the night of April 14, 1912 and sunk with great loss of life. While Titanic's story was widely published in American and British newspapers, the Balkan states were impressed at the Italians' efforts to defeat the supposedly weak Ottomans, creating nationalism within the Balkan League and setting off another war against the Ottomans. For the second time, the Ottoman Empire suffered a great defeat.