I'm sure I'm not the only one that has very clear memories of the books I was read as a child. Some of the earliest were stories about anthropomorphic machines--trains and steam engines--that lived to improve the lives of children. They were all very pro-industry, better living through both hard work, adherence to routine, and technological advancement, and since all of them were obviously old when I was a boy, I always figured they must have dated to some marvelous industrial revolution heyday.

Then I looked up the titles. Little Toot, that happy little tugboat, was written in 1939. The Little Engine that Could trucked toys over the mountain in 1930. Tootle learned the importance of conformity in 1945, after the war for God's sake. When these were written, the little engines were already anachronisms, and while my parents no doubt could spot trains and such in their childhood, no one was shoveling coal to feed them.

One that entranced me for a while in early childhood was Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel (1939), which mostly I remember as noble and sad. (I have no idea how old I was when it was read to me.) The steam shovel was facing obsolescence in the face of diesel power, and the poor thing was so loved, it broke boy Keifus up every time, but everyone was happy in the end. The Little Engine faced competition from worthier locomotives, but managed to get the toys over the hill by herself anyway, proving that even if she was obsolete, she was still relevant. I'll go with nostalgia over anything, or maybe better, since it's adults writing these books after all, that those portals to children's minds must go through that well of the author's own childhood memories. No surprise that writers in thirties and forties called back their fond memories of engineers in overalls and striped hats who'd wave from chugging locomotives, and no surprise at the theme of transition, of growing up and growing old and good times past (especially in the thirties) permeates the enduring stories. They're memorializing their own childhoods as much as anyone who paints a typewriter or a corded phone today. It might be fun to compare the tone of the nostalgia of children's authors from different eras.

Do you have Thomas the Tank Engine in the USA? They're classics in the UK, and my husband grew up on them and then my children did too. They look terribly old-fashioned, and I think there have been attempts to update them, but I would resist that... the children take it in their stride. My daughter was quite disappointed when she saw a real train and it didn't have a face on it, but nothing else bothered her.

The trains run out of coal, and sometimes have to stop and get buckets of water from a local cottage. But no need to change them into modern, high-speed tilting trains.

The books first started appearing in 1945 (though the first one did not have Thomas himself in it), and someone told me that the other great publishing achievement that month was Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited - I'm sure there's a message relevant to this discussion there somewhere!

Moira Redmond

Fray Team

I think that Thomas has gone through something of a modern rebirth here in the states, with his plastic face glued onto every sort of toy. We got the kids a wooden train set when they were little enough for them (this is about five or six years ago), and most of the available stuff had been thoroughly Thomassed. (And we didn't get those, figuring correctly they'd get enough themed marketing thrown at them when they're older.)

I find the second-generation nostalgia even stranger, memories of parents memories. And yet, even if no one really knows half the stuff Mother Goose goes on about anymore, it still resonates.

So the little tank engine never broke into my childhood or my own children's but he's definitely visible. If he had been a little closer, he would have no doubt been my first go-to for smiling locomotives.