Annie And Clarabel - Tumblr Posts

Couldn’t stop thinking about these GORLS ✨

Honestly no one can convince me that Annie and Clarabel wouldn’t be Big Beautiful Babes and hella confident about it.  No wonder all the engines wanna pull them amiright 👀

With Bonus Doodles 🎉

alternatively: characters that never get attention and i will die mad about /lh

They are so cute uh.

IMCRYING!!! /pos THIS IS SO CUTE AND SWEET N GHHHHGHGGH /pos

more Annie & Clarabel hc

@galinneall-dearg is to blame credit

Okay I don’t have “too many” I just have “some, and I’m surprised to even have this much.” 

Annie and Clarabel are not actually Stroudley coaches but from a collection of knock-offs (which were the subject of some legal dispute), created in the late 1880s  

Annie had been earmarked to be removed from service in 1914, but the commencement of war gave her a reprieve, and shortly after that she was brought to Sodor

they were part of a very… diversely-sourced collection of coaching stock that the N.W.R. gathered to begin their main line services in 1915

(and then the N.W.R. wound up painting all of them orange, which actually made life for certain boxy blue station pilots pretty difficult, because it obscured distinctions such as whose brake-pipes are actually compatible)

(they also got their wheels switched out for bogies during the war, on the Admiralty’s dime. attaboy, Topham.)

Annie and Clarabel are cousins to begin with but only met up again and became best friends on Sodor

And about two years later they basically became Thomas’s moms when he started his duties at Vicarstown

… which was a tough transition for Thomas for a lot of reasons…

… going, as he did, from being the construction workers’ darling “baby loco” and doted upon by all sorts of human friends at various sites along the line…

… to being stuck in one big bustling place with a ton of borrowed main line engines (with no sense of community, just their clashing and traumatized egos, and a brand-new often-confused “useless” station pilot as an all-too-convenient outlet for their overworked and homesick frustrations) and a rush of war orders (that always came in last-minute and conflicted with the N.W.R.’s basic timetables, not that the N.W.R. had enough stock to efficiently deal with them anyway)

… and learning how to organize trains in that hot mess was A Lot

Annie and Clarabel took him under their wing and helped him and shhhhhhh this is a deep dark secret but sometimes often Thomas had a good cry while they concealed him from view of the rest of the world. If you mention this though he’d kill you. 

But for all they are Mum, they also quickly develop a healthy respect for Thomas in return because he’s such a feisty thing and mouths right back to all the bigger engines who harass him. Annie and Clarabel are painfully shy, and they find their adoptive son’s huge stock of nerve… impressive

Annie’s brand of shyness veers more towards anxiety, and she can fuss quite a lot about the physical safety of those she loves, and is much more prone to complaining

Clarabel’s brand of shyness veers more towards sheer sweetness. She gets super attached to a small select few that she trusts (“I’ve lost my nice guard! I’ve lost my nice guard!”) She is quite attuned to what’s going on with everyone socially and emotionally, and is very accommodating

Both are worriers, though. And both of them have always found themselves rather at the bottom of any coach pecking order, largely due to this shyness

For all they are sensitive, however, they are no cowards, and have a strong sense of duty… and want to do their patriotic part during the war.

This causes some conflict with Thomas, once Thomas starts to get his wheels under him, because they find that he’s avoiding putting them (especially Clarabel, with her luggage compartment) on the “hot” trains… (the military preferred to ship explosives and such materials on passenger instead of goods trains during the war, because they are faster, and what the hell, they’re only civilians)

Clarabel’s like ‘… dear, I haven’t been put on a hot train in three months.’

Thomas: ‘oh well you know there haven’t been a lot lately. not many at all really. in fact i think they declared peace or something? hail britannia.’

Annie: ‘you’re lying’

Thomas: ‘I MIGHT NOT BE’

Annie and Clarabel make it clear that they want to do the same work that all their sisters, cousins, friends (among whom are quite a few of their assorted bitchy tormentors) do…

… wait, Thomas, no, only ever putting us on Edward’s trains doesn’t count either.

… look, are you really going to make us re-negotiate engine by engine? We love you too, dear, but you mustn’t show favoritism. Your duty is to let us do our duty.

Thomas gives in, and starts rotating them like anyone else

Clarabel is in fact involved in an accident on a hot train during the war but is herself all right (for extra irony points, she’s unhurt, because she had just finished convincing Thomas that yes you must even allow me to work with that ridiculous hot-headed idiot engine that you trust the least, but due to a signal mix-up her hot-headed idiot engine rear-ends Edward’s train, and if Thomas hadn’t given in Clarabel would have been the main casualty of the incident. ALWAYS LISTEN TO YOUR MUMS, THOMAS.)

narrator: as a matter of fact, Thomas never listened to his mums again

(narrator: in fact, in my head, Thomas is pretty good at just blacking out traumatizing events, so he definitely blacked this out as soon as the war was over and that’s why he learned nothing from it)

post-war Thomas continues to favor A & C in other ways, both obvious and subtle, and this doesn’t altogether help their iffy social standing at the station. (on the other hand, you can’t complain too much about getting all the nicest weekend/holiday excursions. well, Annie tries, but they both like it really.)

in the years following the war, Thomas’s job remains amazingly difficult due to the instability of the railway—it would get too long if I detail here all the absurd constraints I see Thomas working under as he organizes North Western passenger trains from 1918-1924-ish. Suffice it to say that most of the trains he assembled might well have been a Mensa-level little mental puzzle. So, addition to sentimental protectiveness, I am forced to conclude that the Fat Controller keeps Thomas so closely tied to Vicarstown because his institutional memory is essential during that time. You could magically beam up a (cheap!) engine three times as smart as Thomas, I guess, but they’d still be lost without his hard-won knowledge of how all the pieces go together

most don’t appreciate just how damn clever Thomas is about his work, but Annie and Clarabel do, and are very proud of him…

… as well as worried about how he gets more bored and lonely with each passing year

they also are worried about themselves, because many of the visiting/borrowed/trialed engines during this time pretty frankly raise the issue of how incredibly outdated all of the North Western coaches are to their faces (and sometimes just outright insult them)

Clarabel is almost always in whatever is passing for the North Western’s express rake during this period, it’s sort of her niche, and she knows that when they launch “a proper express” they will also update the express rake before all the rest of the coaches, and she’ll lose her main job. so this period is… fun. i mean, she doesn’t even really like her job. but she doesn’t want to be decommissioned, either.

Annie’s niche, by the way, is that she has been refitted during the early years on Sodor as a first-class coach. she is so temperamentally unsuited to it, it’s hilarious. you know the vibe of “she’s just don’t fit in with the other officers’ wives”? this times 5. first-class coaches are a snobby, classist crowd. Annie is, on her very “best” day, merely judgmental

so the oldest version of the green-and-white apparently-L.N.E.R. coaches arrive in 1923, a little after Gordon does. Clarabel wishes she could join in with everyone else in complaining and gossiping about the how terrible the new coaches are, but, of course, ever fair, she’s just like “… they’re not horrid or ill-bred or irresponsible or anything. they’re perfectly fine. they’re just, you know. new. (i feel bad because i’ve even caught myself wishing to hear them be nasty to dear Thomas, because an excuse to hate them would be a relief. but, of course, they don’t. and i haven’t. le sigh.)”

so yeah, there’s a certain amount of “I never liked having to be on long rakes anyway because I’m an introvert” and also “I’m relieved to not be on high speed trains anymore because I’m too damn old and I FEEL it” and even a dash of “whoa this new Gresley is a bit blunt even by engine standards I’m sort of fine getting to avoid spending all day with him”… but all mixed in with plenty of well-founded insecurity about the future

as the N.W.R. updates their coaching stock, the “orange coaches” get opportunities to move to the branch lines, and it is considered a good opportunity by most, with lots of scrambling and politics to nab the earliest spots. (coaches are amazing at yard politics. you have no idea.)

Annie and Clarabel should have been the most enthused about the prospect, because a quieter life would suit them perfectly.

but they not only don’t volunteer, but they resist efforts to be reassigned.

because Thomas.

they figure that, once they are moved out to branch, they’ll virtually never see him again.

i mean they know the day is inevitable but they care for him way too much to do anything to advance it

so, they stick out the long hard runs and the main line engines and the other coaches (who are all new or who else are also still on the main line because they are the snobbiest and stubbornnest of the lot)… they put up with all this bs purely and 100% for his sake

and you’d better believe that “hey Annie! Clarabel! GUESS WHAT” was a spectacular day that they never saw coming ♥

and yup, pretty much all their happiest and coziest years were ahead of them. the end.

(now that I’ve adopted the headcanon about their presence on the “bootlace” train and Thomas taking revenge on James, that means that Thomas actually spent some time at Ffarquhar, perhaps even just sort of in training?, without them, before being allowed to choose some coaches from the main line to update the Ffarquhar stock. so that adds an extra layer of pathos honestly, with Annie and Clarabel trying to be brave and supportive about him moving on, and then…)

I drew a humanized Thomas sketches in two papers for three months ago.