Thomas & Friends Maron to Cronk 81st Anniversary

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.