"No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to-and-fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this Earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us."

-Opening Paragraph of H.G. Wells' "The War of the Worlds"

The Steam Holocaust

Written and Researched by BNSF1995 and Broa Island

Proofread and Corrected by Broa Island

In December 1954 or January 1955 (Wikipedia can't make up its mind), British Railways published a report, formally known as Modernization and Re-Equipment of the British Railways, more often known as the Modernization Plan. A government White Paper produced in 1956 stated that modernization would help eliminate BR's financial deficit by 1962. The aim was to increase speed, reliability, safety and line capacity, through a series of measures which would make services more attractive to passengers and freight operators, thus recovering traffic that was being lost to the roads.

One of the key areas of the report was the replacement of steam locomotives with diesels. This caused much concern that the Living Vehicle Act of 1865 could be repealed to accomplish this, as there weren't enough museums and heritage lines for every single non-faceless steam locomotive running on BR at the time.

Other areas included electrifying key mainlines, new passenger and freight stock, resignalling and track renewal, closure of small number of lines which were seen as unnecessary in a nationalized network, as they duplicated other lines, and the building of large freight marshaling yards, with automated shunting to streamline freight handling.

Unfortunately, the plan was doomed from the very start. While the electrification was welcome, and the new passenger stock set the groundwork for later designs such as the InterCity 125, the truth was that it was poorly thought-out. Instead of reacting to changes in the way goods and passengers were travelling in the post-war years, BR was seemingly stuck in the past, trying to apply a simple update to the railways.

Massive investments were made in marshaling yards at a time when the small wagon-load traffic which they dealt with was in steep decline and being lost rapidly to the roads. The Modernization Plan called for the rapid and large-scale introduction of diesel locomotives: a total of 2,500 locomotives to be procured in 10 years at a cost of £345 million. With political considerations all-but requiring that all these locomotives be built by British firms, the scope of this project was beyond the existing capacity of the British locomotive industry. This led to many designs being submitted, and accepted, from manufacturers with little or no direct experience in main-line locomotive construction.

The short timescale of the Plan also meant that there was little time for prototype locomotives to be properly evaluated, trialed and, if needed, modified or improved. Several large orders for hundreds of locomotives were placed while the prototype was still undergoing testing or even, in some cases, before the prototype had even been built. Accepting orders from a myriad of manufacturers also led to BR acquiring an unnecessarily diverse locomotive fleet, with large numbers of different but similar classes. This increased the cost and complexity of maintenance and led to operational difficulties (for instance there was no universal system for multiple working).

The poor reliability of many of the locomotive designs procured under the Modernization Plan led to much lower availability ratings than predicted and the large-scale withdrawal of several classes or the curtailing of planned orders, leaving BR short of suitable motive power in some areas. Some of the diesel classes ordered in 1955 were withdrawn before the steam locomotives they were intended to replace.

Moreover, steam locomotives were replaced by diesel types on a 'like-for-like' basis with BR ordering, for example, large numbers of light-duty diesels intended for local mixed-goods services (such as the Class 20 and Class 24), which failed to take into account the decline in local and branch line goods services which was largely switching to the roads. In conjunction with the new marshaling yards, large numbers of diesel shunters were ordered which would soon be rendered virtually obsolete by the rise of container freight and, like the yards they worked in, often only served a few years before being scrapped.

Non-faceless diesels began appearing in large numbers, soon gaining a reputation, and not a good one. While there were many friendly diesels, there were just as many who were jerks, gloating about how they were superior to steam locomotives, taunting them and making speeches about how all steam locomotives will end up on the scrapheap.

For the North Western Region, diesels were a mixed bag. The diesels permanently stationed on Sodor were of the friendly sort; in 1962, the North Western Region had only two, these being Dennis and Daisy; as mentioned in Chapter 14, a visiting Class D3/2 known only as "Diesel" had come to Sodor with plans to frame the steam fleet for crimes they didn't commit, and get them sent to other regions where they would meet their end. Of course, Sir Charles Hatt was on to him the whole time, and Diesel was sent away in disgrace and served a full 30-day sentence at Rail Gate. From then on, he was a pariah in his shed, which was, ironically enough, Swindon in the Western Region. While his brothers congratulated him for taking the initiative in modernizing the railways, other diesels in the shed were disgusted with him, and the steam locomotives relentlessly attacked him every chance they got. The shed controller himself did nothing to stop the bullying, as the Western Region was one of the more independent regions; after all, the Great Western Railway was opposed to nationalization and to that end, the Western Region kept building locomotives to their own designs, including a glut of various classes of pannier tank engines. Even when the Western Region began building diesels, they were still the odd region out. Whereas most were building and/or receiving locomotives with electric transmissions, the Western Region was using hydraulic transmission for their diesels.

During the late 1950s, railway finances continued to worsen, whilst passenger numbers grew after restoring many services reduced during the war, and in 1959 the government stepped in, limiting the amount the BTC could spend without ministerial authority. A White Paper proposing reorganization was published in the following year, and a new structure was brought into effect by the Transport Act 1962. This abolished the Commission and replaced it by several separate Boards. These included a British Railways Board, which took over on 1 January 1963.

Following semi-secret discussions on railway finances by the government appointed Stedeford Committee in 1961, one of its members, Dr Richard Beeching, was offered the post of chairing the BTC while it lasted, and then becoming the first Chairman of the British Railways Board.

A major traffic census in April 1961, which lasted one week, was used in the compilation of a report on the future of the network. This report—The Reshaping of British Railways—was published by the BRB in March 1963. The proposals, which became known as the "Beeching Axe", were dramatic. A third of all passenger services and more than 4,000 of the 7,000 stations would close. Beeching, who is thought to have been the author of most of the report, set out some dire figures. One third of the network was carrying just 1% of the traffic. Of the 18,000 passenger coaches, 6,000 were said to be used only 18 times a year or less. Although maintaining them cost between £3m and £4m a year, they earned only about £0.5m.

The report had one major effect besides the closure of branch lines, though: the increase in steam locomotive withdrawals.

For many controllers, this was all they needed. These controllers were cruel and unsympathetic. To them, steam locomotives were dirty, inefficient, time-consuming, labor-intensive, and environmentally unfriendly. When it came to non-faceless steam locomotives, they had a special kind of cruelty in mind. These controllers were incredibly cheap, not wanting to waste money on Blair Water when they could be buying diesel fuel. Because of this, non-faceless steam locomotives found themselves being scrapped.

ALIVE.

So began one of the greatest atrocities not just in British history, but world history.

The Steam Holocaust.

Initially, the public was unaware of the atrocities being committed against non-faceless steam locomotives. When pressed as to where they went, controllers would lie and say they were at a heritage site or museum or had elected to undergo the Final Firing. Slowly but surely, though, the truth began to unravel.

The focus of this chapter won't really be on Sodor, but the British mainland.

To say 1964 was an important year is an understatement. Wilbert Awdry wrote and published the book Mountain Engines to serve as a distraction while he followed up on a lead. While writing Stepney the "Bluebell" Engine the previous year, he noticed an illustration Peter and Gunvor Edwards had made, showing two rusted non-faceless steam locomotives staring down at a man with a blowtorch. That it was a dark joke never crossed his mind. Something was wrong.

After Mountain Engines was published, he hoped the interest in the Snowdon Mountain Railway and Culdee Fell Railway would be enough of a distraction to investigate exactly what was going on in BR. He had said in the foreword of Stepney the "Bluebell" Engine that BR controllers were not cruel and were in fact supportive of the preservation movement.

He was wrong. So horribly wrong.

Arriving at a railway scrapyard, he found hundreds of non-faceless steam locomotives sitting on the scrap lines. Sneaking into a shed, he discretely took pictures of a sight that nearly made him vomit: a non-faceless steam locomotive being cut up without having undergone the Final Firing. In fact, there wasn't a single barrel of Blair Water to be found on the premises. The engine was screaming in pain, begging to be put out of his misery, but the scrappers either ignored him or told him to shut up, calling him a menace to progress and a heap of filth, and those were just the words they used that wouldn't get me banned from SiF or push this into M-rated territory on.

What Awdry saw that day changed him. He became emotionally distant and couldn't sleep. The images of such cruelty were locked in a drawer in his study, before he finally took a look at them, and knew what he had to do.

On October 14, 1964, Awdry leaked the photos to the Evening Standard. The next day, the pictures were front-page news, and the atrocities being committed by BR controllers went public. Dr. Beeching reportedly read the story with a look of utter horror on his face, and when finished, the first thing he said was "BRING ME THEIR HEADS!"

The public outrage began immediately. Passengers began boycotting trains pulled by diesels or trains made up of diesel multiple units. Non-faceless diesels were subjected to every insult in the Oxford Dictionary (they usually responded with insults of their own, calling the hecklers "luddites" and "steamie apologists"), and often woke up tagged with graffiti.

Then came the more...extreme elements. Diesels found themselves being bashed around by steam locomotives, a few damaged so badly they had to be given the Final Firing. The prison population at Rail Gate exploded overnight because of this.

But the most extreme of all was... was the Knights of Steam.

The Knights of Steam (they had kicked around the name "White Fang", but something told them that certain non-faceless steam locomotives could find the name offensive, some more than others) was one of the largest anti-modernization movements to have taken shape during the Steam Holocaust. Most of its ranks were made of non- faceless steam engines that had either been withdrawn from service or were still working, just frequently cast aside for diesels. Some diesel engines also joined the Knights of Steam, as most diesels were just as horrified by the Holocaust as their stereotypical steam engine 'enemies'. What made the Knights of Steam even more of a threat to BR was that some of their human members had seats within the House of Commons and Parliament, as such could influence not all but some of the decisions made by both governing bodies. Mainly this influence was used to turn the attention of Britain's politicians towards the ever-growing conflict between America and Soviet Russia (now known as the Space Race), distracting them from the White Fang's dealings on the UK's home soil. It is believed that the Knights of Steam's main base of operations was in a large roundhouse similar to the ones the LMS built at Barrow Hill. The location of the sheds themselves is believed to have been somewhere between the villages of Woking and Weybridge in Southern England.

To keep things short (which may be an impossibility at this point), I will only really be discussing the story of one engine that was part of the Knights of Steam's ranks, even though all of them have pretty good stories to tell. The reason I've chosen to talk about this particular engine is because, after leaving the Knights of Steam, she found her way to Sodor and is currently working on the Normanby Branch Line with Eagle and Tucker.

That engine is Blake.

Blake is a GWR 4300 Class "Mogul", a class of steam engine made famous for the fact some of them served in France during the First World War, including Blake. For the first four decades of her life after WWI, Blake was stationed at Newton Abbot station, hauling goods trains and the occasional passenger service (although she preferred handling the former). It was during her time at Newton Abbot where Blake first met Aaron, a GWR 5700 Class Pannier tank who acted as station pilot. The two grew quite fond of each other and soon considered themselves to be in a romantic relationship. Blake also became close friends with Weiss, a GWR 2600 'Aberdare' Class that had been put on static display on a siding outside the station. Blake and Weiss first met in Africa in 1942 after they, and a few other engines (including Donald and Douglas), were sent to the continent to help the Allies' movement against the Nazis. Starting out, their relationship had been rather rocky, but that is a story for another day.

Aaron always had somewhat of a hatred of humans, a feeling of hate that grew much stronger once the Steam Holocaust began! He often vented his frustrations to Blake, the fact that BR controllers were tossing out the male and female engines that had worked their whole lives to keep England's railways running for more than a century in favor of new, and honestly rather faulty, technology! Blake, however, remained optimistic, assuring Aaron, as well as her other shed mates, that diesels were just a passing fad. British Railways would soon learn the errors of their ways and everything would go back to normal.

Unfortunately, as we now know, that would be far from the case.

The gravity of her current situation soon hit Blake like a boulder in mid-1962, when the Newton Abbot Stationmaster sold Weiss to the Woodham Brothers' breaker's yard on Barry Island, which is considered to be the Steam Holocaust's equivalent of the Auschwitz concentration camp. Blake was lucky enough to see Weiss off and the two had a rather tearful goodbye as a diesel arrived to take Weiss to her death bed. However, Weiss never arrived at Barry Scrapyard, her disappearance was one of the most infamous unsolved cases of stolen property ever tackled by the Metropolitan Police until her rediscovery in 1997 and what was supposed to be her ten year-long restoration.

With Weiss now presumed dead, a tearful Blake admitted to Aaron that he was right, that the writing was on the wall for Britain's steam locomotives. In that moment, the seeds that were to grow into a mighty tree were sown. In 1964, Aaron, Blake, and their drivers and stokers formed the Knights of Steam in secret, the two engines creeping about the various scrapyards and out-of-use sidings across the network, scouting for any future recruits. In just two years' time, the Knights of Steam had accumulated a rather formidable number of members, ranging from non-faceless steam engines, diesels who were sympathetic to the former or had found their own lives threatened due to mechanical unreliability, coaches, trucks, even humans that were affected by the Steam Holocaust in some way (this includes those who had lost their livelihoods to the Beeching Axe or steam engine drivers that couldn't, or refused to, adapt to diesels). During its early years, the Knights of Steam mainly performed acts of protest and sabotage (said sabotages included delaying trains or causing non-fatal crashes), but over time, their methods grew more… violent.

In August 1968, Parliament finally pulled the plug on steam-hauled trains on BR, passing a bill which banned all steam engines from traveling on the mainline. On the day before the bill came into effect (August 3, 1968), a special train entitled the Fifteen Guinea Special (named after the price of the tickets) was arranged, the last official passenger service to be pulled by a steam engine. The following morning, all steam engines, no matter their condition, were withdrawn from service. You would think that this would be the final nail in the coffin for the Knights of Steam and steam in general.

But like any other terrorist group, the Knights of Steam could not, would not, go silently.

For one, steam wasn't truly dead on Britain's railways. The North Western Region, of course, still used steam on a daily basis. Collieries run by the National Coal Board used steam locomotives for shunting, as did other industries. The Vale of Rheidol Railway also didn't dieselize as, even though it was owned and operated by BR, the VoR was, and still is, a tourist line.

Now that BR wasn't keeping tabs on the whereabouts of any steam engines, the engines of the Knights of Steam could now go anywhere they pleased without having to worry about any obligations to the timetable, although they still needed to keep said timetable in mind to avoid getting involved and/or causing any collisions. Now the group was more of a threat to British Railways than ever before.

In January 1969, the Knights of Steam was responsible for derailment of an express passenger service starting from Bridlington. It was this clear act of terrorism that convinced Blake the Knights of Steam under Aaron's leadership was becoming just as twisted and corrupt as the ones they were fighting.

What sealed it for her, though, was learning that the Steam Holocaust was long over. In 1967, after three years of public outrage caused by the Awdry Leak, Parliament launched the largest criminal investigation in British history. The investigation found that the controllers had indeed ignored the Living Vehicle Act of 1865, and were scrapping engines alive, all the while reveling in the suffering of what they viewed as "living reminders of communism", referring to the fact that most communist nations still had large steam locomotive fleets. The nadir was one controller fitting a hydraulic claw to a Class 42 to hunt down and destroy fugitive steam locomotives, a diesel who was really named Vincent, but soon gained a new identity: Diesel 10.

In the end, all who willingly participated in the Steam Holocaust were either sentenced to life in prison or given the electric chair, and those who had been forced against their wills to do so were acquitted once it came out the controllers were essentially running their own mafias.

The still fresh memories of the Shoah came flooding back to the British public as they began asking themselves, with the knowledge of the injustices committed against non-faceless steam locomotives in mind, if they were any better than the Nazis. The British Rail Board was found to have not been complicit in the Steam Holocaust, as they had no idea what was happening, and had been the ones to launch the investigation. Parliament then ordered a massive rescue operation which involved the construction of large shunting yards nicknamed "Funeral Homes", rescuing all non-faceless steam engines from scrapyards county-wide, and immediately sent to the works where they would be restored and sold to various rail heritage societies or just anyone who had fat sacks of cash; quite a few of the non-faceless steam locomotives who were restored have found their way to Sodor in the years since, such as Arthur, and Barry among others.

However, if any recovered engines were beyond repair, they were placed in the Funeral Home yards where they would live the rest of their days in relative peace while chemistry labs all across the country worked with furious energy to produce enough Blair Water to meet the sudden boom in demand. Eventually, the last Funeral Home engine was given the Final Firing and scrapped peacefully in 1974, finally bringing the Steam Holocaust to an end (all Funeral Home yards were converted into goods marshaling yards once their original purpose was fulfilled).

But Aaron had hidden this from the Knights of Steam. In truth, he had gone insane and was now plotting to enslave mankind, even planning to have the humans modify all non-faceless vehicles to be able to reconfigure their bodies into humanoid forms. This idea later found its way to a Japanese toy-maker called Takara, who made two toy lines called Microman and Diaclone, which eventually caught the eye of American toy-maker Hasbro. The rest...is history.

There was no denying it. Blake had to get out of there. And that's exactly what she did.

With a tanker filled with water, a truck loaded with coal, and her driver and fireman gathering various forms of wood to add to her fire if necessary, Blake left the Knights of Steam's HQ behind, much to Aaron's disbelief and fury when he found out the following day. Blake had no idea where she was going to go, her only end goal was to get as far away from the Knights of Steam as possible.

In her aimless wandering, Blake accidentally found her way onto Sodor in July 1969, where she finally broke down just after passing through Vicarstown Station. When Sir Charles Topham Hatt II heard that an unknown engine had just crossed over the Vicarstown Bridge, he was understandably furious, as he didn't want a repeat of the Oliver incident (more on that on a later date). However, despite his frustrations, the Fat Controller understood why Blake had come to Sodor (though accidentally), as he was well aware of the horrors occurring on the British mainland but was powerless to do anything to stop it. The police soon arrived at Vicarstown and took Blake's crew away for questioning while Philip (whose a LNER Class Y1, NOT a modified PRR Class A6) shunted their engine onto the out-of-use siding. Soon after, Yang arrived to take Blake to Crovan's Gate. It took a while but the two soon hit it off and have remained close friends to this very day, Blake also became quite close to Ruby. At the Steamworks, Blake was given a complete overhaul after British Railways, after hearing the news of her arrival on Sodor, sold her to the Fat Controller on the cheap, as they had no need for her anymore.

During the police interrogation, Blake's driver and fireman hastily perpetuated cover story that they and Blake had escaped from a Southern Region scrapyard with the help of a few friendly diesels and workmen. This cover-up was passed on to their engine for her to take up with the help of a series of written notes and messengers that Blake's crew had convinced to help them. Blake would continue to use this falsified backstory when the topic of her past was brought up.

There is more to Blake's story that I haven't touched upon, but I'm going to stop here and save that for another day. Right now, I will talk about the fate of Aaron and the Knights of Steam.

Aaron's fate is well documented and became somewhat of a ghost story among Britain's rail enthusiast groups. He committed suicide by crashing head-on into a passenger train on June 8th, 1971. In the aftermath of this attack, the Army Reserve launched an investigation into the Knights of Steam, which was disbanded as a result of the investigation. Those found responsible for the attacks were sentenced to either execution (getting either the Final Firing or the Electric Chair) or lifelong incarceration.

But regardless, the damage had been done. BR faced a massive PR nightmare, as their controllers had been responsible for the creation of the Knights of Steam. Realizing the controllers had too much power, in 1971, the controller system was replaced by regional supervisors, and by 1982, the regions had been dissolved in favor of business sectors. But the events of the Steam Holocaust would haunt BR up to Privatization.

Today, the Steam Holocaust is viewed as one of the greatest tragedies in history. It highlighted the dangers of modernizing too fast, as well as blind patriotism, as those who participated in the Steam Holocaust thought they were protecting Britain from communism (again, because most communist countries still had large steam fleets).

Just about the only region not affected by the Steam Holocaust was the North Western Region. But even then, they still had their fair share of changes in the 1960s. But that's a story for another day...