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Whatever, it was certainly a breakthrough so far as I was concerned. What they all knew, and I did not, was that Britt Allcroft's first TV series was due to air in October 1984 - for Kaye & Ward to have a brand new addition to the Series before then was most timely. He suggested that I send them to his editor, who duly presented them at their next production meeting, where they seem to have greeted with what the popular press now calls acclaim. "Good heavens no, why should they?" was my reply. "Do Kaye & Ward (as my father's published were then known) know about these?" my father asked. The following March, my parents came to stay, and, during the lull while we awaited their taxi home, I produced the stories as a talking point.
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Then, having concluded my writing exercise reasonably satisfactorily, I put the whole lot to one side. It worked fairly well, so over the next couple of months I put together another three stories, all based on ideas taken from my railway reading. Besides, my son Richard had, over the last few months, heard all of my father's stories at bedtime three or four times over, and I felt like a change even if he didn't! I'd never written a Thomas story and thought it might be interesting to try. Eventually I decided to see what I could do. So he did, and I went away and thought about it. "I can give you an idea - it happened here only last week." Well, he's forgotten more about railways than I know, so what chance does that give me?" "One of the reasons why father gave up," I replied, "Is that he felt he was running out of ideas. "Why don't you carry on writing the stories?" he queried. During a conversation with an engine driver, he made the connection between my surname and Thomas. In 1982, busy with the research for a magazine article, I visited one of British's many heritage railways. But it was another five years before I announced to a schoolfriend that I wanted to write for a living, and still longer before my initial efforts turned into anything that could be published. What that August evening may have done was to give me the beginnings of the idea of how and why stories are conceived and written, and perhaps it was then that the first seeds of this book were sown. Back in May 1945, back when the first of my father's books, The Three Railway Engines, was published, it certainly wouldn't have occurred to my not-quite-five-year-old mind that I would be writing a foreword for a collection of my own stories 60-plus years later.Įven a six mere years later, when, at Great Yarmouth on 31 August 1951, my father and I encountered the ex-Great Eastern Railway tram engine which became the prototype for Toby, I was no wiser.