#shedside manner

[houseboatisland]

For the ask game: Arthur?

The locomotive version of "a pleasure to have in class."

just mentioning again, this'll be my last "send a character for headcanons" thing for a while! feel free to send other questions as long as they're more specific. ty all for sending! <3

The NWR Numbering scheme is... a mess, and has nothing to do with engines' order of arrival. When the NWR became independent at BR's privatization, they were basically like, "Okay, guys. This is the last numbering order. For real this time. On God. I don't care who has what questions or suggestions, we're NOT doing this again. Numbers 1-11 everybody knows. Numbers 12 and up... what happens, happens. And from now on until numbers stop existing, THIS IS THE ORDER." Additionally, that renumbering threw every earlier renumbering out the window. Oh, you were No. XYZ in 1950? No, you weren't; as of now, you've ALWAYS been No. ABC, don't dispute this, you'll do my head in. Toby's first NWR number for instance WASN'T No. 7, but later became it, (and nobody knows when anymore,) and that's good enough to say he's always been No. 7. And that's why Arthur, despite being preceded by dozens of engines for decades, is considered No. 12, and on paper at least, has ALWAYS been No. 12.

Arthur was bought directly from BR in 1967. At that time, the NW Region was going on a huge engine buying spree as the final abolition of BR steam neared. Several of the engines weren't in running order at the time of their purchase, but Arthur was.

He appears much the same in my canon, but his wheels are black, he doesn't carry his "LMS" initials, nor does he carry the number 41241. What his actual BR number was specifically is immaterial, but it wasn't that. Also, his dome is brass! This was inspired by James, who had been in the Works for some maintenance or another during Arthur's preparation for service. James was *flattered,* and he's taken a shine to Arthur ever since. If you mess with Arthur and James finds out, your life won't be worth living.

Arthur floated from place to place as a spare engine until getting the Norramby Branch in the Nineties, which he now runs with Ryan's help. They're a couple <3

Arthur's "Spotless Record" thing was sort of like his TV debut. Since the dawn of public railways, (depending of course if said railway was diligent in record-keeping, and we know many weren't!), behavioral profiles have been kept by the various managements on their engines. These were considered important not just for rewarding or punishing engines, but also their potential resale values. Say you had two twin engines, both exactly the same in strength and build and upkeep from funnel to rail, but, Engine A was a saint who behaved well and never shied from work, while Engine B was rude, spiteful or lazy. Engine A, all mechanical qualities aside, would command a slightly better price than Engine B. Arthur, from the minute he rolled out of the workshop, has been, and I'm hardly exaggerating when I say this, an angel. Crews used to fight or bribe to get assigned him for shifts. He was and is so willing, saw no job as beneath him, and followed instructions to the letter. He was everything an engineman would want for a fuss-free day of work. Being in working order at time of purchase, with this in mind, Arthur was worth a pretty penny compared to his siblings. But, that made him an especially worthy find in Sir Topham Hatt's eyes.

The accident that tarnished his record happened when Thomas was temporarily pulled aside to teach him piloting, and happened in Tidmouth Yards, not out on the line. Arthur forgave him coldly, but bygones were TRULY bygones when he found out Sir Topham Hatt wouldn't put the accident on his record, it having been Thomas' fault. Then things could really be hunky-dory between the two tank engines.

[houseboatisland]

all right, asking formally—how did Sodor come to be the first place where engines broke from their psychological chains and started romancin'? who were the first daring souls to claim marriage for their own? (*whispers* and was it arthur and ryan?)

Oooh, am I excited to answer this!

Sodor’s always been a natural leader when it comes to what railwaymen call “shedside manner.” Shedside Manner, revolutionary last century but commonplace to us, can simply be defined as “respecting machines beyond their status as machinery.” The Fat Director, for example, was leaps and bounds ahead of his Mainland counterparts for visiting his engines face-to-face, and especially for talking to them about things unrelated to work. The bigwigs at the Furness Railway or LMS would never tell him to his face lest it soured business, but they saw him as out of his noggin for this.

Engine discipline, (which was Mainland management’s only concern for engines after work and physical maintenance,) traditionally was delegated to someone lower, like a yard foreman. It was expected of them to be cold and uncompromising, even if the punished engine had been in the right all along. Because yard foremen were far more likely to be sympathetic to engines they worked with daily than their superiors, they would themselves face punishment if they were too lenient with engines they were responsible for. In many ways, engines were viewed merely as horses which happened to speak the same language that their masters did. The Fat Director, who we all know was no saint, calculated that this approach would be “bad for the bottom line,” in that engines would mature to become groveling, completely unable to think for themselves if their humans failed, and more delicate, not less, for their humans to work with.

This introduction made short: Sodor was always leaps and bounds ahead of other railways out of one man’s desire to make a cohesive workplace first, and a pleasant workplace second. Culturally this became the standard for Sodor, and still is today after decades of normalization. The desire, the NEED to just legitimately respect engines, has grown to match its original purpose: the desire and need to have functional engines as a result of this respect.

So, as this mindset took root after The Fat Director’s instigation, so too the concept of Shedside Manner began to be interpreted from perspectives beyond “happy engines = functional engines.” The Fat Director, like virtually all other railway controllers and conservative pockets of enginemen, viewed all engines as aromantic, if not out of legitimate belief, but instead an aversion to the idea that engines could compute romance. The Thin Clergyman felt the same way, going so far as to take liberties as he wrote his famous stories, to not include snippets that could indicate otherwise. Only after his death, and the publication of the long-guarded interview transcripts he referred to when converting “raw information” into readable narrative, have we learned of this self-censorship.

Accordingly, many non-Sudrian readers have sadly been convinced of the same. (😔)

We’ll never know who the first non-married vehicle couple was, Sodor or elsewhere. But archival evidence in the form of locomotive logbooks, pioneered and considerably utilized by the Great Western Railway, confirm that engines have always been capable of such emotions. We know this because records dating as far back as the 1850s reveal punishment of engines for pursuing relationships, and their humans documented this with palpable, dripping disgust.

“ Locomotives ‘Stewart’ and ‘Pollux’ are to be separated at the first convenience, and punished with Two Weeks’ Disuse alike. Such ‘magnetism’ between two Man Made objects will surely embarrass the company, and any passenger, gentleman or layman unfortunate enough to bear witness to such scenes will surely be repelled. It defies Christiandom that these objects should pursue any fulfillment beyond the serving of Man. I am, etc....”

So, the phenomenon of locomotives romancing has always existed, much as many would prefer to deny the reality of it beyond private writings. The SECOND Fat Controller, Sir Bertram Hatt I, (A/N: my own take on Sir Charles,) was a much more compassionate, empathic, and frankly less erratic head of the railway compared to his father. He took what his father taught him about Shedside Manner to heart, and felt especially compelled to delve deeper into the concept as he watched events unfolding on the Mainland’s railways from afar. Mass branchline closures, the death and rebirth of narrow gauge, locomotives being scrapped decades before their time, locomotives who were fell out of favor as ‘non-standard’ and were built poorly as policy was in flux, and the obvious example of dieselisation. Any such traumas needed to be avoided for his own engines and workers at all cost, and if that was impossible, for such traumas to be blunted.

It was Sir Bertram Hatt I who was the first controller, or first board member of the NWR or NW Region at all for that matter, who recognized that engines had the ability and right to pursue companionship of this kind. Sodor, which had gone through devolution and been allowed its own Parliament by the Attlee Government in 1946, has since seen several pieces of legislation debated and passed regarding Machine’s Rights, including their rights to marriage in 1969. Several “unions” had already been maintained secretly between engines, carriages and so on for years past, but now were able to be validated in the eyes of the law.

The first “married” machines were Edward and BoCo that same year. Same-sex human couples were never formally criminalized on Sodor historically, and had been de facto recognized on the Island as a result, so this was a non-issue between engines. Although there were some minor grumblings from engines such as James and Donald who objected to a steam engine marrying a diesel, (gender again was no object to either of them,) these were quickly swept aside as BoCo increasingly ingratiated himself with the other engines.

To answer that last bit: Arthur and Ryan first began working together in 1995, when Ryan was moved up to Harwick. He was initially bought to help at the Tidmouth Hump Yard, but was too much of a pushover with the trucks, so now he’s that branchline’s main passenger engine, with Arthur handling the fish trains and other goods work. It only took a year of passing each other in stations and sharing a shed to realize they were sweet on one another. They waited until the winter of 1997, when the Fishing Season had well and truly slowed down, to have their wedding. They exchanged vows as their fires were dropped, and fell happily, excitedly asleep by the light of the ash heap <3

[houseboatisland]

oh no they're duplicating

📂 📂

(sorry this became so big i'll have to answer your second emoji in another post aaaaaaaa)

Cranky is a tall, stationary shore crane situated at Tidmouth Docks.

By the time of his arrival in the late Forties, Tidmouth had been Sodor's principal port for decades. It was already well-established and built up with countless warehouses, wet and dry docks, a fishing fleet, and a shipbuilding complex*. Sewing this confused, bustling mass together was the Tidmouth Port Authority's internal railway system weaving its way through sooty alleys and past the doorsteps of pubs and chip shops. It was all chaotic, a lot to learn from the minute he landed, and noisy. But Cranky was determined to bring his new home to order, and if nothing else, make a good reputation for himself with the dockworkers and The Fat Controller.

Cranky had been manufactured in the United States, and shipped disassembled to Sodor as part of postwar aid by America to the United Kingdom. Despite spending so little of his formative years around Americans, Cranky has from the first spoken with an American accent. Built in the state of Pennsylvania per embossing on his original parts, he has inexplicably come to talk comparably to a Brooklynite, for example pronouncing "harbor" as "hawbuh." His voice is also a bit hoarse like a tobacco smoker: This occurs commonly in sentient machines working most of their lives near salt water.

Originally named Cranky because of the loud yet satisfying "clunk-clunk-clunk" of his gears when turning his 'head,' Cranky in his youth was far removed from his current self. He was upbeat, never gave others an attitude, and above all pushed himself relentlessly with his work.

This is where the Cranky we know starts taking shape.

By the late Fifties, nearing ten years of perkiness and willingness to go the extra mile, Cranky felt unnoticed despite all his efforts. He had done everything he was supposed to and more, and yet the recognition he had sought from the beginning had failed to materialize. He began to become crabby. Barring one close call**, he never once stopped working out of bitterness. On the contrary, Cranky worked harder still in a sort of passive-aggressive way to get attention. A consequence of this, which he surely knew, was that his system would wear out faster. Cranky hoped that by being in such a poor condition, sympathy and appreciation would come to him when this was discovered.

By the Seventies, nearing forty years old and watching new cranes be erected close by, Cranky developed a complex about being replaced. As a result, he never spoke with these cranes, despite spending years next to them around the clock. This never happened, but it was a real fear of his at the time, and he only shared it with his operators years later in the strictest confidence.

In the Nineties, the recognition that Cranky had longed for for so long finally presented itself. The Fat Controller, (by now the grandson of the one that had been in charge at Cranky's arrival,) was the first of his lineage to pay Cranky a visit. The two previous Fat Controllers never had. They saw Cranky and the Port Authority's railway as outside their jurisdiction, (and to be fair, as far as managing the NWR goes, they are.) Sir Bertram Topham Hatt II however was even more of a humanist and an appreciator of Shedside Manner than the shining example of his father. He spoke at length with Cranky about his work, his life, his insecurities, his hopes and dreams, and most importantly, explained and apologized for the absence of his father and grandfather.

Touched, Cranky opened up at once. He's since... changed for the better, but he's still not the crane of his infancy. He still makes the occasional remark and has a small chip on his shoulder, but he never pushes himself too hard, and (usually) waits for an excuse to be grouchy with someone, for example an engine being impatient with him for no reason. He's more charmingly cantankerous than legitimately bitter. If you saw him in action, you'd find it cute really.

*The television series incorrectly depicts Brendam Docks as being the Island's most important port, but also downplays its size when it does. The real life Tidmouth Docks has several miles of internal track, and the aforementioned packed urban and industrial backdrop. Brendam Docks in the television series meanwhile is one or two warehouses with three parallel railway lines facing the water, with sleepers rather than rails set into the pavement. It's a point of contention with Tidmouth's dock workers, and Edward has said that if Brendam were as important in the show in real life, Bill and Ben would have burned it down five times by now. Hatt's engines are often on Tidmouth Port Authority metals, but the TPA also have a gaggle of tank engines, a handful of tender engines, and several diesels that belong to them privately. These engines interface with Cranky much more than the Famous Eight etc.

**Cranky is able to be disassembled and reinstalled at a new place of work as needed. However, he finds this extremely stressful after spending his entire life at Tidmouth. A plan to move him to Arlesburgh in the Seventies as that port boomed fell through when he refused to consent and even threatened a work stoppage. So powerful is Cranky's bargaining position as the most important crane in the Island's most important port, that the proposal died immediately.