The Three Railway Engines - William Middleton

The Three Railway Engines - William Middleton

The Three Railway Engines is where it all began, seventy years ago the first book of what was to become the Railway Series was published. Although the book was ready for publishing in 1943 owing to war time conditions it was not published until 12th May 1945, just four days after VE-day. The small oblong book, designed for children's hands, had a print-run of 22,500 copies from the publishers Edmund Ward. There was one major difference between the first print-run and the book you will be familiar with today and that was of course the illustrations. 

©ThomasTankCollectables Archives 2014

The first illustrator of the Railway Series was William Middleton, known to Edmund Ward through his printing connections. Middleton was a lithographic artist who had little experience as an illustrator. The engines appeared toy-like and their faces looked as though they had been traced around a coin. The Rev.W.Awdry was very disappointed with the illustrations as he had explicitly requested for them to be technically accurate to steam locomotives and scale. Although William Middleton only illustrated one book that was later re-illustrated by C.Reginald Dalby, his legacy remained through the troubles he caused. The William Middleton illustrated book was only available for a short period between 1945 and October 1949, by which point a new edition with illustrations by Dalby had been produced. Dalby went on to provide the illustrations for a further ten books for the Railway Series. Wilbert Awdry was not impressed with Dalby's illustrations either as he felt Dalby perceived all engines as being the same and had little regard for real locomotives, despite this Dalby produced some beautiful illustrations with vivid colours and idyllic countryside. The illustrations of Dalby and Reginald Payne are some of the best remembered and most recognised of the entire railway series. 

This image shows the inside cover of a new edition Three Railway Engines book. There were seven editions of the original copy of the book as shown. 

The illustrations of William Middleton remained lost to the public until they were discovered in 2014. We released them in a series of four videos, one for each story, with narration from the Rev.W.Awdry himself and Johnny Morris. We felt this was a great way to begin celebrations for the seventieth year of the Railway Series. You can see the videos for yourself via the link below. In addition to the story videos we released a video comparing the illustrations of William Middleton and C.Reginald Dalby. Furthermore we cropped the images in half and attached both sides together, to comical effect! Most of them didn't work as nicely as the one below but we will be releasing all of these alongside this blog post. 

©ThomasTankCollectables Archives 2014
Watch the videos here

Watch the comparison here

If you have any comments, please feel free to comment below or send us an email: thomastankcollectables@hotmail.co.uk