Origins
In a sense, Annie is actually the oldest character in the Railway Series. Long before Wilbert Awdry wrote the stories, he was a model railway enthusiast. In 1927, while still at school, he built a model coach. In 1948 he constructed models of Thomas and his coaches to run at a local village fair, and so used that 1927 coach as Annie. He built a new coach to represent Clarabel.
Unlike most of the characters in the Railway Series, Annie and Clarabel do not appear to be based upon any specific prototype. However, they are fairly typical of suburban coaches, such as might have been used for branch and secondary services. Christopher Awdry has suggested in a character profile that they may have been rebuilt from older, six-wheeled coaches by The Fat Controller. Unlike most of the engines, the history of Annie and Clarabel before their first appearance in the books has been kept very vague. Most models of the coaches show Annie with a slightly shocked expression on her face, while Clarabel usually appears smiling.
The television versions of the characters bear a strong resemblance to coaches of the Metropolitan Railway, part of what is now the London Underground. Annie and Clarabel, along with Old Slow Coach, are the only coaches to have facial features, except for the Narrow Gauge Coaches from Season 4. Annie and Clarabel are also very similar to the old coaches from Season 1.
Read more about this topic: Annie And Clarabel
Famous quotes containing the word origins:
“Grown onto every inch of plate, except
Where the hinges let it move, were living things,
Barnacles, mussels, water weeds—and one
Blue bit of polished glass, glued there by time:
The origins of art.”
—Howard Moss (b. 1922)
“Lucretius
Sings his great theory of natural origins and of wise conduct; Plato
smiling carves dreams, bright cells
Of incorruptible wax to hive the Greek honey.”
—Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962)
“Compare the history of the novel to that of rock ‘n’ roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splintered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.”
—W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. “Material Differences,” Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)