The Island of Sodor is a fictional island that is the setting for The Railway Series books by the Rev. Wilbert Awdry (and his son Christopher). It is also the setting of the Thomas & Friends television series, though it is significantly different from the island in the books. Sodor lies in the Irish Sea between Cumbria and the Isle of Man.
Awdry wanted a consistent set of locations for The Railway Series. He wanted them to be in Great Britain,[note 1] but sufficiently isolated from British Railways to allow him to write the stories he wanted. He was inspired during a 1950 visit to the Isle of Man, which forms the Diocese of Sodor and Man.[1] Awdry, a Church of England cleric, noted that while there was an Isle of Man, there was no island of Sodor.[note 2] He decided to create a fictional island of "Sodor" as the setting for his books. Sodor would be between England and the Isle of Man, isolated from the British railway system, but somewhere that readers could easily imagine.
Awdry and his younger brother George worked out Sodor's history, geography, industry and language ("Sudric"). Inspiration came from various sources. Dryaw was an anagram of Awdry. Elsbridge was named after Wilbert's parish of Elsworth in Cambridgeshire. Some place-names were Sudric equivalents or near-equivalents of those in the real world (for instance, Skarloey was a rough Sudric equivalent of the Welsh Talyllyn: logh and llyn mean "lake" in Manx and Welsh respectively). They created more details of Sodor than would ever be used in The Railway Series stories.
Their abridged notes were published in 1987 in a book titled: The Island of Sodor: Its People, History and Railways (republished with some minor modifications by Christopher Awdry in 1992 under the title Sodor: Reading Between the Lines).
The fictional native language of Sodor is "Sudric" or "Sudrian", a Goidelic language similar to Manx.[3]
Many of the place names are based on Manx words, but often conforming to English word order, e.g. Killdane, which comes from "Keeill-y-Deighan" (Church of the Devil),[4] and the hills, called Knock and Cronk.[citation needed] The names of some of the "historical" characters – used in the background but not appearing in the stories – were taken from locations on the Isle of Man, such as Sir Crosby Marown (Crosby is a village in the parish of Marown) and Harold Regaby (Regaby is a tiny hamlet on the parish boundary between Andreas and Bride).[5]
Below are some words and phrases, and place-names translated into English:
Sodor is usually shown as much larger than the Isle of Man. The island is roughly diamond-shaped, 62 miles (100 km) wide east to west and 51 miles (82 km) long north to south. Its north-west coast is separated from the Isle of Man by a strait called the Sudrian Sea (Faarkey-y-Sudragh), four miles (6 km) wide. In the north-east, it overrides and replaces the real Walney Island. Its highest mountain is Culdee Fell, which was modelled on Snowdon: the ridge of Devil's Back copies the Clogwyn ridge on Snowdon. The summit is reached by the Culdee Fell Railway, which is based on the Snowdon Mountain Railway in Wales.
The capital and administrative centre of Sodor is the city of Suddery; Tidmouth is the largest town on the island. One of the more famous settlements on Sodor is Ffarquhar, the terminus of Thomas's branch line.
The railways of Sodor include standard and narrow gauge railways, a rack railway and a 15-inch gauge railway. The first few stories concerned standard-gauge engines (including Thomas the Tank Engine). Stories set around the narrow gauge railways soon followed.
The standard-gauge railway system consists of a mainline and several branch lines. They are linked to and interoperable with each other and with the mainland system, so that the standard-gauge engines can visit locations in Britain under their own power. In Gordon Goes Foreign, several of the engines recount working in London when they were younger, and later in the same story Gordon pulls the Wild Nor’ Wester to London. In the story The Fat Controller's Engines, eight of the famous engines visit London.
There are three narrow-gauge railways: the Skarloey Railway, the rack-and-pinion Culdee Fell Mountain Railway, and the Arlesdale Railway. On the west side of the island, the 15 in (381 mm) gauge Arlesdale Railway runs from Arlesdale West along the trackbed of the abandoned Mid-Sodor Railway. In the center of the island, the Culdee Fell Mountain Railway runs west from Kirk Machan to the summit of Culdee Fell. On the eastern side of the island, the Skarloey Railway runs northwest from Crovan's Gate up the valley to its namesake, Skarloey Lake. Rolling stock is moved to and from the narrow-gauge railways on flatbed wagons on the standard-gauge system; for example, Rheneas is sent away for repairs in Skarloey Remembers and returns in Gallant Old Engine.
Each of the narrow-gauge railways links to the standard-gauge system at an interchange station:
The Island of Sodor in the Thomas & Friends television series differs significantly from that in the books. Wilbert and Christopher Awdry's notes have been largely overlooked. The television version of Sodor appears quite larger and has more industry. The connection to the British mainland was not acknowledged until the 2013 feature-length film special King of the Railway, which introduces "The Vicarstown Rolling Bridge", connecting Sodor to mainland Britain. The connection was further acknowledged in that special (though perhaps indirectly), by having King Godred's crown hidden secretly below Ulfstead Castle in a chest.
