To those of you who don't have children (particularly boys, but many girls love the trains of Sodor), Thomas is a Tank Engine who rides the rails of the Island of Sodor. He's the brainchild of a British pastor, who made up a series of stories about Thomas and all his railway buddies (plus a few that provide different methods of transportation) for his son.

Amy Vernon grew up on Long Island and has lived in the Chicago, Miami, Phoenix and New York metropol...read more

At one point, such luminaries as Alec Baldwin and George Carlin narrated some of the stories on TV. They're more or less wooden dolls and trains filmed not even stop-motion. I'm not sure what the style of cinematography is, but they've recently gone CGI and the trains and stationmasters and other folks actually move their mouths when they talk and the like.

Anyhow, the point is that my son loves nothing more than to play with his trains while we run episodes of Thomas in the background. He's been sick, so he got to just sit and watch several episodes in a row today and something struck me.

These are the most accident-prone trains I've ever seen in my life. Where's OSHA and the Federal Railroad Administration? OK, their British equivalents, because the imaginary Island of Sodor is somewhere off the coast of Britain, I assume.

Story after story, engines disobey orders because they want to prove themselves "useful" or "excellent" and end up crashing or being late or losing a load or something of that nature.

In one episode we watched today, Peter Sam, in his eagerness to be a hero and show everyone the missing statue he'd discovered, crashes backwards and ruins an entire load of cream.

In another, Rosie, in her eagerness to prove herself useful and take the entire load of carnival cars to their destination rather than to be Emily's "back engine," loses an entire load of pink sugar (for cotton candy?), the seats for the rides, and a huge load of coconuts. More disturbing than the fact that this is due to Rosie's eagerness is that this is also due to the couplings coming undone as she's driving.

I'm sorry, but shouldn't someone be fired for making couplings that come apart so easily? In the world I live in, someone would have been sued and Rosie would have been consigned to the scrap heap. Instead, the railway superintendent, Sir Topham Hatt, allows Rosie to go back and get all the cars and be Emily's back engine after all and the carnival is saved.

Other snippets: Diesel shunts Thomas under the gravel chute and he's covered from buffer to buffer in stone dust. Salty picks up a load of fuel that gives all the diesel engines indigestion and makes them unable to function. Diesel and Thomas race around Sodor backwards, generally not getting their work done and crashing into things.

Give Sir Topham Hatt's job to me. I'll have those naughty little engines running shipshape in no time.

Oh, and I'd convert them all to electricity, for a start. What's up with all the coal and diesel? With all those railways on this little island, I'm thinking it'd be a lot more polluted than it is. But that's a story for another day....read more blogs