NWR Illustrated

@BegleyOwen37671 Yes, edited in photoshop. It’s a photo illustration

@RhysPage98 Thats edited

Brendam Bay Harbour and the china clay workings. D2 BoCo has arrived with a rake of empties as numbers 1 and 2, Bill and Ben, stand ready to begin loading, while SCC number 3 waits to draw the loaded hood wagons across the points from the harbour.

@LtlNgn I’ve never been able to picture Percy originating in the coalfields or heavy works; he’s always felt too light-natured, cheeky and carefree for that sort of environment. A silk mill tramway or modest works line seemed to suit much better.

@LtlNgn Thank you! Yes, that was exactly my thinking! I imagined them as secondhand purchases from a small textile concern, probably somewhere in East Anglia. Not especially heavy or grimy industrial — more rural, light industry.

“If I choose you, will you work hard?… That’s a good engine. I’ll call you Percy.” This is my piece ‘We need a tank engine’. A line of smartly turned-out tank engines stand ready for inspection, based on the illustration from Trouble in the Shed, of future NWR No. 6

@LtlNgn The name itself was fairly spontaneous. I thought it sounded suitably post WWI-era and industrial — but, in full honesty, I was watching Blackadder while working on the piece and the phrase popped into my head.

@LtlNgn “Whizz Bang” actually came about because I wanted to justify that red tender engine in the original workshop line-up illustration. It felt like it needed to be a bit of an oddity — perhaps an experimental engine that hadn’t had much luck in service and was now quietly up for sale

@TheVnmr Ooh and the faded number 11 on Percy’s buffer beam a reference to his own book being the 11th released in the railway series

@TheVnmr I added “Dalby” as a little nod to the well-known illustration disagreements between Dalby and Awdry, and “Sericulture” to hint that the line worked in silk. Silk moths → caterpillars, which felt like a playful reference to the Reverend’s famous “caterpillar” description of him.

@RhysBDavies @TheVnmr They must have been an extraordinary sight in motion behind a rake of coal wagons — those flangeless centre drivers, only an inch apart, must have made them quite something to handle on the curves!

@RhysBDavies @TheVnmr I’ve even amassed a small collection of rusted fishplates, rail fragments and bits of steam coal from the old trackbed over the years.

@TheVnmr I didn’t use AI for this. Just a very, very long night finishing it. It would’ve been kinder on my sleep schedule if I had, but alas! I’ll try to take that as a compliment. It’s actually built up from layer upon layer of composited imagery and hand-painted elements in Photoshop

@RhysPage98 This feels really ai, unless its photo shop? Im too tired to tell

@EngineofI96636 Instead I named it “Whizz Bang” as I was watching an episode of Blackadder with the Red Baron and Lord Flasheart at the time. That word was said a few times and it sort of stuck.

@EngineofI96636 The other workshop engine in the background is the James Toleman engine, also known as Winby’s express “duplex” locomotive. Was originally going to rename that engine “Failure” as a nod to its prototype but that felt unkind.

@C59Zach @GbHtrain It does make him look slightly like an Auton from Doctor Who — and yes, he’s technically missing a finger. But four are overrated anyway. From a distance, though, the effect is doing exactly what I wanted it to — and sometimes that’s the trade-off with illustration.

@C59Zach @GbHtrain I really wanted that very specific gesture — as if he’s saying to his colleagues, “this is the one.” Hands are always tricky. If you zoom in you’ll actually spot my solution: I duplicated his index finger structure across each digit to get the pose working.