The Island of Sodor, or simply Sodor, is a fictional island that is the primary setting for The Railway Series books by Wilbert Awdry. It lies in the Irish Sea between Cumbria and the Isle of Man. The island has many railways, including many locomotives, the most famous being Thomas the Tank Engine. The island also appears in the television adaptation Thomas & Friends and other media in the franchise.

Inspiration and creation

The Railway Series author Wilbert Awdry wanted a consistent set of locations for The Railway Series. He wanted them to be in Great Britain, 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. Awdry, a Church of England cleric, noted that while there was an Isle of Man, there was no island of Sodor. 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 2005 under the title Sodor: Reading Between the Lines).

Language

The fictional native language of Sodor is "Sudric" or "Sudrian", a Goidelic language similar to Manx.

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), and the hills, called Knock and Cronk. 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).thumb|200px|The flag of Sodor, as depicted in [[Thomas & Friends: The Great Race (2016)]]Below are some words and phrases, and place-names translated into English:

{| class="wikitable sortable plainrowheaders"

|-

! Sudric

! English

|-

| Nagh Beurla

| I do not speak English

  • The Skarloey Railway, a narrow-gauge railway, runs from Crovan's Gate (where it links to the North Western Railway) up to Skarloey, with a loop line from Rheneas to Skarloey.

Notes

See also

  • United Kingdom
  • Irish Sea
  • Walney Channel

References

Further reading

  • Timpson, Trevor (4 July 2011). "Where is Sodor, home of Thomas the Tank Engine?". BBC News website. Retrieved on 4 July 2011.
  • The Mapping of Sodor