Thomas the Tank Engine, new edition

Duncan loves Thomas the Tank Engine. Of all the book formats depicting the bold Thomas and his useful friends, his favourites are the slim hardback editions by the publishers Ladybird and Buzz books.

He's been trying to collect the full quota of these books over the years, and since they're no longer being produced new, we have to buy them second hand via charity shops and internet shops or they're received as gifts from friends whose own children no longer want them. Recently he discovered a series of YouTube films from an obviously similarly dedicated fan, who has shown pictures from the books with audio from the Thomas and Friends TV series. Duncan has taken lots of screen shots of these and then adapted them with other images and even his own text, then printed these out on our old monochrome printer, coloured them in and stuck the pages together to create his own books.

Here are some of the images he made. This is his version of the back inside cover, listing some of the other titles in the series. It even has a bar code.

These are some of the inside pages that he has adapted with his own version of the text and his preferred choice of pictures.

It reads,

"prentley he herd a whistle
gordon was verry cros
insted of nise ching
coashes but the others not
help out he was
a lot of thery dirty trucks
a goods train
a goods train
he grumbled the sham muddy all
the shame mud edward laghted"

The actual text is something like (from memory)

Presently he heard a whistle. Gordon was very cross. Instead of nice shiny coaches he was pulling a lot of very dirty trucks.
"A goods train, a goods train!" he grumbled, "the same of it, oh the shame of it!"
Edward laughed.

I can see a few places where he has misheard the words and tried to fill in as best he can with alternative words. I like the use of "the shame muddy" for "the shame of it"! The spelling is interesting too. He's managed to spell some difficult words properly and has made some good approximations for the rest.

I asked him to read out for me and told him the correct words for the ones he mixed up, but he's so contrary he insisted on his own version. I reckon he probably did hear what I said but just didn't want to lose face by admitting he had heard it wrong.

Here's another of his self typed pages. Though the story is about Gordon it's illustrated with pictures of Thomas, one of them taken from his Train Simulator program. I'm sure there's a perfectly reasonable explanation even if I'm too blinkered to see it.


It reads:

"hurry hurry puffed gordon to the coashes
now all he gon to fast
gordon gruned at the coashes az thay rech the top of the hill."

I don't think that needs any translation from me.