James (RWS)/Behind the Scenes

The Railway Series
James is a fictional standard gauge tender locomotive created by the Rev. W. Awdry. He is the No. 5 engine on the North Western Railway.

He first appeared in The Railway Series book, Thomas the Tank Engine, which was published in 1946. His last appearance was in Thomas and his Friends, published in 2011.

Front of James:

In real-life
Awdry's first model of James was a 2-6-0 Glasgow and South Western Railway locomotive, the "Austrian Goods", designed by Peter Drummond. He later rejected that prototype on the grounds that an English engine would most likely end up on Sodor. Awdry's second model of James was based on a 1960s Tri-ang "Johnson 3F" 0-6-0, a conversion which Hornby later used for their James model.

Awdry's model
Awdry built two models of James. The first was commissioned; based on a GWSR 403 Class and painted red with yellow lining. It was tempermental and the motor only worked in one direction. Several years after being replaced with the second model, it was given a new chassis and motor and was repainted into GSWR green.

Both models are currently at the Narrow Gauge Railway Museum in Tywyn, Wales.

P.R.Wickham's model
Edmund Ward had comissioned P.R. Wickham to produce models based on Engines 1-6 around the early 1950's, and were featured in an article titled "The Locomotive Family" featured in the March 1953 issue of Model Maker Magazine. These models were made in 7mm scale and were unpowered due to the lack of motors, although they did prove to be guides for the illustrators to work with, and the designs were based on C. Reginald Dalby's original illustrations.

1953 BBC Model
An OO scale model of James was created in 1953 for the BBC's adaptation of The Sad Story of Henry.

Meccano Ltd. (who manufactured the Hornby locomotives) supplied three OO scale Duchess of Atholl models and a tank engine which were first sent to the publisher's offices in Leicester to be "lightly modified" by P.R. Wickham in order to create the engines for the broadcast. He painted two of the engines to different colours and rebuilt two from Balsa wood, much to Meccano's surprise (they had only approved of faces being added). Wilbert Awdry said that the models are "similar if not almost identical to the illustrations".

While no recordings of the original broadcast are known to have survived, the February 2021 edition of the BBC's newspaper, Prospero, revealed that a number of documents relating to the production have been preserved including a picture of James' model.