Talyllyn Railway - in Fiction

In Fiction

The Talyllyn Railway is represented in the Railway Series books by the Reverend W. Awdry and the spin-off TV series Thomas & Friends as the Skarloey Railway; most of the fictional locomotives are based on real-life equivalents. Awdry visited the line on a family holiday in the early days of preservation and became involved as a volunteer soon afterwards. Several of the stories in The Railway Series come from his real-life experiences at the Talyllyn, and some of the books contain full-page illustrations of Talyllyn locomotives.

The preservation of the Talyllyn Railway by volunteers was the inspiration for the 1953 film The Titfield Thunderbolt, an Ealing Studios comedy about a group of villagers attempting to run a service on a disused branch line after closure. T. E. B. Clarke, the script writer for the film, had heard about the preservation of the Talyllyn and spent a day on the railway in 1951, and some of the early incidents in preservation were incorporated into the film. In the book Railway Adventure Tom Rolt recalled that he had hoped the film might be produced on the Talyllyn, but it was eventually filmed on the recently closed Camerton branch of the Bristol and North Somerset Railway branch line along the Cam Brook valley in Somerset.