[Don't mind me. I'm just a line bump]

Sodor at War!

Written and Researched by BNSF1995 and Broa Island

Proofread and Corrected by Broa Island

At the outset of World War II, Sodor was once again viewed as the most-likely target for Germany to use as a springboard for invading the British mainland, though military experts disagreed, saying that they wouldn't invade Sodor until Southern England had been taken care of. Regardless, the military still fortified the island to assuage the fears of the populace. Coastal artillery, anti-air guns, barrage balloons, and the fighters of the Royal Air Force became a common sight on the island, and destroyers and light cruisers patrolled the waters.

Following the Fall of France, Sodor became even more fortified. The engines of the North Western Railway found themselves hauling long goods trains full of war materiel more than their normal services. It eventually got the point that Sir Topham Hatt had to designated certain engines for the military trains, and in the end, he chose the S&M Red Engines. They served valiantly to keep the British war machine alive, moving supplies from the interior to the ports at Tidmouth, Knapford, Brendam, Kirkronan, and Norramby (Arlesburgh Harbor was considered too small to be used by merchant vessels).

Although intelligence confirmed Germany viewed Sodor as a low-priority target due to the fact the only way on and off the island from the British Mainland was by rail or car ferry, the island was still turned into a fortress once BBC Sodor began stirring up fears that Ireland would join the Axis and invade Sodor. Due to its distance from Europe, few German bombers were able to reach Sodor, and fewer still were able to drop their payloads. Most of the damage done to Sodor came from offshore bombardment by destroyers and cruisers in hit-and-fade attacks, always kept on the run by British ships and naval bombers. On June 24, 1941, German destroyer Z27 (which had just been commissioned in February of that year) attempted to destroy merchant ships while they were docked at Tidmouth, but a rail-mounted coastal gun pushed by Thomas destroyed the vessel before it could fire a single shot.

But for this victory, the Germans scored their own victories. On May 15, 1942, Norramby Harbor was completely bombed, thus forcing the flow of supply to be diverted to Kirk Ronan and the mainland. Then, on June 27 that same year, tragedy struck.

Seven of the nine Red Engines (George, Ringo, Michael, Alec, Brandon, Johnny, and Richard) were at Kirk Ronan Harbor, awaiting their next assignments (Eagle and Britt had left just half an hour before). They were happily chatting away about this and that. Then, a marauding U-boat that had slipped past the patrols surfaced in the harbor and fired a pair of torpedoes at a T3 Tanker docked at the fuel depot at the time. Both torpedoes hit the ship in exactly the right places to cause the boiler to explode, and as the tanker was loading fuel at the time, it also managed to destroy the fuel depot and the gunpowder vans.

And right next to the depot...were the Red Engines.

The U-boat slipped away in the chaos but was discovered by the USS Ironwood and forced to surrender.

When the sun rose on June 28, the damage became clear. The depot was completely destroyed, same as the gunpowder vans. George, Michael, Brandon, Johnny, and Richard had been killed instantly in the blast, while Ringo and Alec were barely alive. The two were taken to Steamworks, where a quick inspection concluded they were beyond repair. The Final Firing was administered that evening, and by June 30, any parts that couldn't be reused or repaired were sitting in Crock's Scrapyard; the parts that were saved were used to repair the three remaining Red Engines (James, Eagle, and Britt). On July 2, though, Britt, overcome by grief, took her own life by driving herself into the smelting pit at the scrapyard at Barrow-In-Furness. James and Eagle, now the last Class G4s in existence, could do nothing but carry on.

The loss of these eight engines had disastrous results for the NWR, as a new motive power crisis developed. At this point, the mainland railways pitched in to help, and hired out several locomotives. The LMS sent a 2P named Archibald, the SR sent a Z Class named Sandra, and the LNER sent three engines: a B12 named Sarah, a J50 named Harry, and a V3 named Edwin (the GWR was too hard-pressed to send any engines). The LNER engines did wonders for that railways' reputation on Sodor, but Archibald and Sandra may as well have been the second coming of Alfred and Cecil. They were rude, arrogant, and extremely selfish, and their crews harassed passengers, bullied other crews, and insulted Sir Topham Hatt behind his back. At one point, Archibald even said nasty things to Percy and made him cry. The two bullied every engine, and just about the only ones they wouldn't dare go after were Ruby and Yang, who proved they would not hesitate to hurl their insults back at them or even throw their weight around.

The two troublesome engines were put in a siding days after they arrived, and remained there until 1943, when they were put back into service, worse than ever. They got their comeuppance, though, on September 23rd, 1943. The day of the worst rail disaster in Sodor's history.

Sandra's came while pulling a gunpowder train. After going too fast, she became a runaway and crashed into Vicarstown Station, destroying it in a large fireball that could be seen from Barrow; luckily, Sandra wasn't too badly damaged (only her back-end had been melted), and the station had been evacuated minutes before the crash, but she had deliberately shaken her driver out of her cab so he couldn't override her and take control (this is a feature all non-faceless vehicles have, with manual mode being activated if any of the cab controls are moved from a neutral position), and her fireman tried in vain to stop her, jumping clear before the crash, and her guard was temporarily blinded when the brake van was shaken loose from the train and tea was splashed in his eyes.

As for Archibald, he was assigned to a troop train, and was being incredibly rough with the train. He ended up hitting Sandra's brake van at the Hawin Ab Viaduct and went careening into the valley. His driver and fireman jumped clear, and the coaches stayed on the rails. As for Archibald himself, he was more angry than hurt, only suffering a bit of rust from the water.

Also worth noting that during the operation to recover Archibald from the ravine, the breakdown crew found… something…

Both Sandra and Archibald were sent back to their respective railways in disgrace, and later served a full 30-day sentence at Rail Gate before becoming victims of the Steam Holocaust in the 1960s. In their place, the LNER sent a second B12 named Kirk, and the SR sent Thomas' sister, Jenny. The two were well-received, with Jenny easily falling in with Thomas and Yang.

Kirk didn't last long, though, as he was killed along with a visiting non-faceless LMS Fowler 4F named Harriett at Vicarstown Sheds on August 3rd, 1944 when a V-1 Flying Bomb meant to hit Kirk Ronan Shipyards went off-course due to a guidance system failure, destroying the shed and killing the engines.

The engines mourned, but thankfully, that proved to be the last attack on Sudrian soil by a hostile military force to date, as on May 7, 1945, the Germans surrendered unconditionally. The engines breathed a massive sigh of relief. It was over. The war wouldn't truly end until Japan surrendered to the United States in September, but Sodor was nowhere near the Pacific. The NWR and Skarloey Railway returned to normal peacetime operations June 1, 1945; on the same day, the Culdee Fell Railway also returned to full operation, having run just two trains per day since the war began, and even then, only as far as Devil's Back, as the Summit Hotel had been requisitioned by the RAF to build a radar site that could provide real-time positions on German aircraft; this radar site was opened to the public as a museum in 1988.

The war proved to be the last hurrah for the Mid-Sodor Railway, as they were instrumental in providing lead for the war effort. After that, though, the MSR felt the full sting of the Peel Godred Branch Line, and with attempts to market the line as a tourist attraction a lost cause due to most of the villages and hamlets along the line having been victims of off-course V-1s, and with the mine at Cas-ny-Hawin flooded, and the others stripped beyond safety margin for the war effort, the MSR closed in January 1947. Stuart and Falcon were sold to the Sodor Aluminium Works, while no buyer could be found for Duke, as most found him too old, the Skarloey Railway could barely afford to keep Skarloey and Rheneas running, and the Ffestiniog Railway, where he had been built, had closed in April 1946. Duke was therefore oiled and sheeted in his shed. The remaining MSR locomotives met a variety of fates, with only Jim, Tim, and Atlas (all three now owned by the Skarloey Railway) being known to have survived to the present day (Albert was killed in a mining incident and replaced by Falcon in 1902, Stanley had been turned into a generator due to rough riding and his devil-may-care attitude towards accident, and given the Final Firing as a mercy-kill after the shutdown, and the three unnamed engines sold in 1936 to keep the railway's head above water have never been located; Smudger never existed, having been a creation of the TV series staff by repainting Rheneas' model so they wouldn't have to waste money making a model for Stanley only to use it for under a minute of screen time).

The war had changed not just Sodor, but the entire world forever. With Germany, Italy, and Japan defeated, the international political landscape had been changed. It wasn't between great empires anymore, but political and economical ideologies. It was the east vs. west, capitalism vs. communism, the USA vs. the USSR. World War II had ended only for the Cold War to begin. And with the invention of nuclear weaponry, for the first time, mankind faced extinction not from a natural occurrence like a super volcano or asteroid, but by its own hand.

But the engines of Sodor were far away from all that. They had more pressing concerns regarding their future.

The Big Four were dead, and British Railways was rising to take their place!

Oh… But what about that something the workmen found under the Hawin Ab Viaduct? I'm afraid I'm not allowed to discus the details...

I guess that means that story will remain... untold.