Had these stories never been written I'll bet that not half as many steam locomotives would have been preserved today! This will forever be one of my favourites, and I simply can't rate this any lower than five stars for the level of nostalgia that this series will always have for me.

The drawings that are included in with the stories are just an added bonus too, and I spent hours pouring over them as a three- and four-year-old kid. Lady is the small young girl 0-4-0 Sodor standard-gauge Victorian-styled Lost Magical Golden Steam Tank Engine Locomotive that used to travel on Mr.On a study of the text, the characters are simple, and easy for the reader to relate to, while representative of the many personalities of a human, such as cheeky Thomas, boastful Gordon, wise old Edward, and Devious Diesel, while the society is reflective of the period of publication, 1945 to 1972, through the patriarchal figure embodied in Sir Topham Hatt, the Fat Controller. So like I say when I read the various children books - I still have so much to learn from the classics what ever they are. He took me to the faraway mythical Island of Sodor to see Thomas the Tank Engine because Thomas was his special friend and he told me the truth about the train schedules and the non-train vehicle schedules on the faraway mythical Island of Sodor. Fast forward to 2013 and I remembered how much I wanted to own this book so I tracked it down and finally today I finished reading it! Conductor’s top favorite mittens down in the toilet and had fun and laughed about it for weeks and that did not make Mr.

To be clear, the title "The Complete Collection" refers to the fact that these are all of the Reverend Wilbert Awdry's Railway Series books. He grew up close to the railway and was convinced that the steam engines all had different personalities. Here is an example from Duck and the Diesel Engine, featuring Duck and the Fat Controller having a chat about the rather stuck-up big engines. I wanted to see her make her brand-new friends with Thomas and his gang of talking Island of Sodor trains and talking Island of Sodor non-train vehicles and Mr.So yes, as I've already pointed out a little - I really enjoyed how authentic the stories were (minus the talking locomotives obviously! Junior the resident of the beach that stuffed the rainbow-colored party poppers down Thomas’s short stumpy smokestack funnel to make Thomas get very angry at him, but the good and happy news to know was that Thomas was so happiest to make his brand-new friends with Lily because he made his brand-new friends with a brand-new girl.