The Island's Swansong

I - Sodor Soil

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.