HATT'S ARMY

By JustSomeHobo

Volume 1: Thomas, The Runaway Train

Chapter 1:

A First Yarn, A Last Straw

"The sun was too bright, the air was too dry and my rods were too sore. I could come up with all sorts of excuses for why I was the last one out of the Tidmouth sheds that morning, but looking back, I think I was simply in denial. From the moment I got up at a quarter past eight that morning, I just knew, at the bottom of my boiler, that it was going to be an uncomfortable day.
For the last hour or so, Maxwell, my driver, had applied buckets of oil and all the strength he could muster to open my conveniently-seized-up regulator, while Boris, my fireman, tried to build up what steam he could with so much ash blocking the firebox flue. It took them a while to figure out, via process of elimination, that it was all my doing; I was holding my regulator shut so what little steam the fire could heat never made it to my cylinders, holding my breath so that little air could come through anyhow, and still pretending to be asleep. If it's any comfort, it was hard for me as well. To me, it was almost not worth staying inside.
All of a sudden, the illusion was shattered when a bolt of pain tore through my chassis. "AAUGH!" I gasped aloud, jolting forward an inch. My attention immediately flew to the source of the pain. A fisheye lens, looking down from where the roof of my cab met its anterior wall, snapped to attention, almost in time to catch Maxwell in the act of driving his boot into my regulator valve. "Alright! Alright! I'll go, I'll go, I'll go," I half-yawned, wincing tightly. Boris was now staring at Max with a look that said, You did NOT seriously just do that, and Max glanced back as if to reply, It worked, didn't it?

Now feeling wide-awake, stiff and sorry for myself, I finally started onto the turntable, halfheartedly scanning the track ahead for anything that could be in the way. I started with the tracks directly ahead of me. They didn't look much different from the day before, so my eyes wandered further down the line, meter by meter, as they adjusted to the daylight. In a moment or two, they reached the double junction that directed traffic headed eastward to either the depot behind me, or to Tidmouth a number of statute-miles off. It wasn't set against me, and so I impulsively looked up to check the signal. Green. Good. Along the way, though, my eyes came upon the large, majestic Knapford station a quarter mile away, and they lingered there, attracted by both the way the sun glinted off its glass roof and the murmuring from its direction. Looking closer, I soon found where it was coming from: a large crowd of passengers adorning its four platforms. A rarity at this hour, I thought. They must be waiting for the Wild Nor'Wester. Doesn't it leave at eight? What's keeping it? Where are the coaches? In the 2A, 2B and 2C sidings, up yard. Where I leave them each evening. Where I left them last night. I haven't gotten them yet. I never did it. I wasn't there. And now it's all late! I made it all late! I wasn't there! I failed them! Oh, God! I failed them all! I wasn't there! I-

"Thomas! What's going on up there?" Maxwell prompted into the talkback in my cab, obviously worried about the heightened pitch in the whine my auraphone was giving off. Lost in a sudden whirlwind of panic and guilt, I could give no reply. Recognizing the gravity of the situation, Boris had tugged the whistle cord in a conventional Rule-55 manner, closed the throttle and applied the emergency brake; then the two of them stood flat against the back wall of the cab and covered their ears. For a moment, all that could be heard was my own uncanny murmuring, the 'ta-tuck ta-tuck, ta-tuck ta-tuck' of the track under my wheels, and my cab's auraphone floating back to Earth like a feather, from a howl to an invasive whimper and finally a lowly hum.

The storm soon died down, and I felt safe enough to open myself up again. I opened my eyes, took a look around to make sure all was still where it was, then signaled with a succinct 'pip-pip!' that I was present and accounted for. Maxwell was already checking my instruments to see everything was in order, and Boris had taken a pencil and notebook from a rack on the left-hand wall.
"Type...four… suuudden… auuurral… perrrrturrrrbaaaation," he pronounced, scribbling as he went. He looked into my peephole lens. "Addendum…?"

"Quote: Unit reports episode was, um, geas-induced via 30 to 40-minute …er… operational delay. Full recovery by-" here I paused to check my chronometer- "...t-plus one minute, ...fffforty-n seconds. Unquote. All clear, Max."

"Away we go," said Maxwell, and reached for the regulator crank- but not before it swung open on its own accord. As I started off again, this time with an extra spring in my strokes, I felt a number of irritating stings as several sparks hit the sides of my smokebox. Another couple of puffs, and they blew through my funnel, corkscrewed through the air for an instant and were no more.

"2C, please!" I whistled to the signalman. Faintly, fifteen meters straight away, there came a faint series of clicks, then a hiss from closer by as I felt Maxwell cracking open my regulator. What my driver and I were trying to hear the turning points over was the incessant murmuring of the eight express coaches ahead of us:

"I think you all ought to know I'm feeling very sore."
"Did you all hear about the cheesecake incident last week?"
"I heard Mrs. Peterson is having another baby boy!"
"Do you like my carpets? I just had them vacuumed this morning."
"Shut up, Beatrice, nobody asked you!"

"Hurry up, you little cinder!" spat Gordon irritably, waiting to set off just ahead of the switch from the yard to Platform 1. His outburst ensured that the coaches, as if on cue, stopped their chitchatting and turned their widened eyes to meet his.

"Speak for yourself," I suggested offhandedly, rolling my own eyes. (Internally, I was actually surprised he started it this time. He was usually too tired to talk back when these sorts of things happened, after all. It usually played out after the Nor'Wester pulled back in.)

"Yes," I thought I then heard him say to himself, "I will." I couldn't be sure, for even now the coaches had begun whispering to themselves again:

"What's gotten into Henry this time of year?"
"I've got this horrible pain all down the side of my undercarriage…"
"Look at this net that I just found!"
"Cut back on belly fat by never eating these three foods!"
"Do you kiss your mouth with that mother?"
"You like my haiku? It's about my favorite furniture catalogue…"
"Do the Greeks really have no word for 'no'?"

The last few coaches were coupled to the train, the signal was given, and the points were set for me to Platform 1. Pulling into the station, I could partake in my favorite activity to kill the time: man-spotting.
Now, when people go trainspotting, they only see one or two trains go by every ten minutes. If you don't really relish it, I imagine it gets dull fast. But when I look over to the platform, there are often many people there waiting for their trains, and at least one or two stand out from the crowd. Perhaps it's a lady with a big floppy Spanish hat or beehive on their heads, or a young punk with straight, long locks and a leather jacket. On occasion, late on Friday evenings, you get a fellow who's so drunk he can barely stand, giving the stationmaster a two-fingered salute with the arm that's not in its jacket sleeve. That day it was a little boy wearing a suit two sizes too large and crying his mum's ears inside out. As I pulled in with the coaches, giggling at him as I went, he waved to me, shouting his thanks and prompting glares from many of the grown-ups nearby. I was so busy watching his father instruct him to pipe down that I wasn't prepared for the sharp thud of Gordon's rear buffers hitting the coach behind him. 'He's rarely ever been this rough with the Express before,' it occurred to me as he whistled and gave the all-aboard. 'Ah well. We are in a rush.'

This wasn't nearly the first time we had started out this late, nor the latest we had started, and so I knew by heart the standard procedure for when the Wild Nor'Wester was out past 8:05; I was to assist the express, uncoupled, out of the yard from behind before I could move on to shunting the next train. Otherwise, I would've tried to move away, and so the next few weeks would've come and gone like any other I'd ever had; and by today I would either have melted away in a steelworks in Vicarstown or the Greater Isle, or worse, in one piece, left to rust forever in the Woodham yards. But I didn't, those weeks went differently, and I did my share in holding out against the Beeching Axe to tell you this today. But that's another story. This is… well, this is this story. Now! Where were we?

Ooh, yeah, we were about to help pull the express!
So, anyway, Maxwell and Boris had left my cab for Haverty the Yard Boss to brief them, and they knew I could be trusted with my own devices when they were needed elsewhere. So, as is common for an engine with nothing to do and no-one to talk to, I closed my eyes to rest, turning away from Gordon's gruff manner and the shell-shock of this morning and looking back on more pleasing memories… the smell of potted lilacs, a late-night breeze whistling through an empty depot, the startling CRACK with which one Guy Fawkes Night firework seemed to become thousands. But even then I kept my funnel out for the signals to start, and soon they came, one by one; firstly the uncanny silence as the passengers' feet died down, then the thump, thump, thump, thump, thump of the carriage doors at the crude hands of the porter… and soon enough, from the head of the train, a shrill guard's whistle.
At first, the whistle came faintly, but the sound carried with it a single basic impulse, and no sooner did I recognize this pulse it that it seemed to echo from within and without me, amplifying itself to the pitch of a siren.

On.

My mind was thrown out of focus for an instant, and before I could have stopped myself, I had thrown my weight up against the coach in front of me.

I quickly regained self-control and, still pushing, began to self-inspect my buffer beam for damage. Seems relatively clean overall, I thought. Always a good sign. Regulator? Not dented. Looks good. Field phonograph? I tested it earlier, it was loud and clear. The shock mount looks to be in one piece. No cracks. Left buffer? Looks clean. Not bent. Right buffer? Eh… straight enough. Deciding all was good to go, I looked back up just in time to see the end of the station platform pass and the Tidmouth skyline come into view.

Ten. Nine. Eight. Seven. Six. Five. Four. Three. Two. One.
Watching the draw gear of the coach ahead of me to ensure I did so smoothly, I began to apply my brakes, only to witness the screw coupling between us pull taut with a firm yank. In disbelief, I screwed on my brakes tighter, but this only resulted in a gritty screech from between my six wheels and the rails beneath them. The framework of the signal gantry marking the vomitorium of the marshalling yards swept overhead, and with my fisheye, I followed it through my cab window to see Knapford Station shrink into the distance and out of sight, as the train quickly gathered speed into the wooded valley ahead.

At this point, the auraphone in my cab sounded like a boiling teakettle. But I decided to make use of my own whistle anyway.

'Pip-pip-pip-pip-peeeeeeeep!' "Help! Stop the train! There's been a mistake! I've GOT to be back at Knapford!" I shouted desperately. But the door to the coach ahead of me stayed closed no matter what I did. There was no sign anyone would come to my aid, much less alert the guard to my presence. Soon, with no one to stoke it, my fire died down, and I was feeling too exhausted, sore, and nauseous from sheer speed to cry for help; so I resigned myself to waiting in silence and simply looking around in hopes that someone would happen upon me.

I didn't have long to wait, for soon the express ran through a small village, with queer houses and shops of wood and brick. My apertures widened at the sight of boxy old cars roaring up and down the streets and all the little people walking along the sides. There was a church steeple and, of course, the town had a little station of its own. It wasn't much; just a platform with a booking office and a car park. Our train sped right past it- evidently, I reasoned, it wasn't impressive enough for Gordon.
Soon we came close by what I would later learn was a sawmill. Some of the logs were laid on a gated clearing and tied up in threes, and many more lay waiting disorderly in rough rows by themselves. The tied logs were being dragged by tractors into large aluminium sheds, with furnaces that belched clumps of cinders out of a central pipe into the sky, like disintegrating cannonballs. I was almost frightened until it, too, was gone in a flurry of branches.
Not far ahead was a viaduct that bridged a green river valley. To my left, I saw the river underneath dissect itself as it got further away into streams trickling through the countryside beyond, with a flat-bottomed riverboat about to pass under. To my right was another mill, this one with a wheelhouse, and off in the distance I could barely distinguish where it met the ocean before we were back in the forest again.

For what felt like hours, I slid along the smooth rails like a bobsled at the fastest I'd ever gone. Meanwhile, my axles were going numb, my valve gears pulsed with pain and my brake shoes threatened to suddenly have worn away at any moment. It was here that I encountered another first: left here, so close to danger and so far from help, with the Wild Nor'Wester still racing along without a care in the world, I wondered if it would've have made a difference if I hadn't been here at all. At last, the train did come to a stop, but by then I was feeling so faint that I could barely tell. When I finally found my bearings, they were in the palm of a stationmaster's hand, one that was holding up two fingers in front of my eye.
As I was backed away manually from the end of the express to a spur with a small water tower, I saw the most shocking sight of all. Just ahead was a formidable hillside, with the forest becoming sparser the higher it got, until the highlands were more or less covered in yellow grass. Four lines of track ran up a shallower stretch, crossed over one of the slopes to the top of the ridge, and disappeared over the very top to the other side.

My ogling was rudely interrupted by the deep trill of a familiar whistle, and I looked up in time to hear Gordon shout, "Pick yourself up off your buffers, old boy, ya can't just sit there when there's so much hard work to be done. Catch me if you ca-an, hohoho!" And with a loud hiss and a blast of breaking steam, he was off and that was that.
As I got my fill, I noticed a puff of white steam near the foot of the mountain, and my eyes followed it to see Gordon and his Wild Nor'Wester charging bravely uphill and away.

To cut a long story short, I gathered my wits and reported back to Knapford as soon as I could.
But for long afterwards, whenever I was shunting at Knapford, I found myself gazing back into the distance beyond the station and, most of all, at the Hill, which was once invisible to me and now seemed to dominate the local skyline.

I had been asleep past the Morning Report before, and had my own geas throw me into panic, and assisted the Wild Nor'Wester out of the station on slow mornings. All these had happened to me at least twice in my past. But this I did not remember. Until that day, Knapford Station, together with the depot nearby, had been my very world. I had always seen Gordon, Henry, James and Edward pull away into the distance with their Trains, but I had seldom wondered where they went or where they came back from, for there was always another train ready to be put together before I could finish watching one of them puff away.

We were always intended to function on a need-to-know basis, and of the scope of my job, all our superiors at the LMS felt I needed to know amounted to this:

My name was Thomas, and I was a Tank Engine who worked at a Big Station on the island of Sodor. I put Coaches together into Trains, making sure they were at the Station's Platforms in time for the Bigger Engines to take them on Long Journeys, and when Trains came in from Long Journeys, I took them apart into Coaches and put them in the right Sidings so the Big Engines could go and rest. This was called Shunting and it was my Job.

And since there was always so much Shunting to do and it was all I could do to get it done, I, in my small mind, christened myself The Hardest Worker On The Railway, and would often flaunt boastfully to the other engines this ignoble prize's innate inability to be taken away.

When Gordon broke that illusion, I schemed for several days on how to pay him out in turn. But then the terrible news came that the Germans had taken Paris and were presently pushing towards the Channel. That afternoon, all traffic stopped as a war report from Prime Minister Churchill came over the station intercom. Engine though I was, I was as an Englishmen through and through, and so, together with the Passengers, I listened intently as he discussed how the British and French forces tried, but failed to turn them back, and the successful evacuation besides, and what was to be done in the face of all this. He had this to say about the infighting going on in Buckingham Palace itself:

"Let each man search his conscience and search his speeches. I frequently search mine. Of this I am quite sure, that if we open a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find that we have lost the future."

He then went on about so many Armies and Navies and fights-over-Dunkirk, and I gradually lost interest. Work started again, but it goes without saying that my world was never the same.

It also goes without saying that I gained a newfound respect for Gordon and the Wild Nor'Wester, and never bothered to disturb him again while he was resting. He certainly made sure I saw for myself the true extent of hard work on our railway. But along the way, I saw so much more.
I caught a glimpse of something far greater than myself and my station and my Job. Something the radio and the tongues of friends and strangers alike had only hinted at.

And I still didn't know just what it was but it was glistering and new and clear and fresh in my mind.

And I wanted it back again.

AUTHOR'S NOTE

Hello! (pulls out wad of index cards from back pocket, holds it in front of his face as he shuffles through them) Ni hao! Hola!/Ola! Marhabaan! Kon'nichiwa! Zah...drav...stee...voo...eetay! Hyalo! Selamat datang! Bonjour! Namaste! Although it's been said many times, and in many ways: it's a pleasure to meet you all, whoever and wherever you are.
(tosses all index cards carelessly over his shoulder)
Now with all the formalities out of the way, let's get into the thick of this!

I intend this series to be more of a loosely-inspired de/reconstruction of the original RWS/TTTE Season 1-4, as an examination of what makes the engines of Sodor tick. Yes, I'm aware that I didn't have to make that choice as there are many fan-retellings that simply skirt over it, and there are several others that DO try to deconstruct it, but I felt obligated to write my own on account of plot holes that plagued some of these. Shed 17 speaks for itself, and Tony Gestaple's Something Most Foul doesn't account for the many engines that are not from Sodor but are also nonfaceless. Even if you take away the many sentient engines introduced after Season 4, there's still the question of City of Truro's cameo, especially- you know what? I've said too much for now.

Looking forward- specifically next chapter, which will hopefully be out in about a month- I will introduce some more of the human characters who care for and work with the engines of the NWR, and who I plan to have a more substantial influence as characters in the story. This is because, with so many characters and the potential for so many more,I think the Thomas mythos lends itself to a more sitcom-esque structure than what we see today. To be frank, I'd like to see to see less of Thomas and more of his Friends. I suppose it's important for the show to have a singular mascot, but even then I have one pressing question: If Thomas's name's in the title of the show and he's the star of all of his yearly Direct-To-Video TV movies, why doesn't HE do the narrating? Then the kids watching the show would feel more of a personal connection, so it'd do wonders for brand loyalty. Besides, it would certainly help justify his apparently mandatory appearance in each episode.

But I'm getting off-topic.
Now, let's talk about how this will be organized.

The Chapters- the individual web pages, that is- will contain one brief story, or Chapter Arc, involving a number of characters and narrated by one of them in the first person (as opposed to being narrated by an omniscient storyteller, which seems to have rubbed off on every single fan-work in this fandom from the original series.)
These chapters will be grouped into Volumes, each of which is made up of 5-to-10 Chapters and encompasses a single Volume Arc which revolves around a single main character in the series, who is the protagonist of said Volume. To recognize this, the volumes themselves are named after and narrated by said Volume Protagonist.
All these volumes will make up the Series as a whole, which has its own Series Arc about [SPOILERS EXPUNGED]

I leave you with this public service message:
They've already built a great wall between Mexico and America. And Gorbachev would be impressed, for they've done it without laying a single brick.

Well, I guess that'll be it for this month. Whoever and wherever you are, I'll catch you in a few. Signing off!