From Disney’s Something Wicked This Way Comes to Square Enix’s Final Fantasy VI, trains have a rich association with horror in media of all stripes. Even today, many decades after the golden age of the railways, they remain potent symbols of inevitability and the brutalising force of industrial modernity. Depending on your tolerance for historical anecdote, you could argue that one of the first horror films ever made was, in fact, Auguste and Louis Lumiere’s celebrated L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat, a 50-second long shot of a steam engine pulling up to a platform. According to legend, the film frightened audiences who imagined that the train would burst through the frame and crush them.



Skip forward a century, and trains are bursting through frames of a different sort. One of the video game modding community’s odder recent crazes is replacing characters in game worlds with Thomas the Tank Engine – the ​”Really Useful” children’s TV character now owned by toy company Mattel. The first of these highly unofficial mods arrived for Bethesda’s fantasy epic The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim in 2013, morphing its roaming dragons into airborne, fire-breathing locomotives. Other victims of the trend include Rockstar’s top-selling Grand Theft Auto V, FromSoftware’s gloomy ninja adventure Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice and Capcom’s flashy remake of zombie horror classic Resident Evil 2.

As you’d expect, the mods are essentially jokes, much like the stoner-friendly Thomas rap remixes of the noughties. ​“To be honest, the whole thing was spontaneous,” recalls Kevin Brock, game designer and author of the original Skyrim mod. ​“A friend of mine gave me some Thomas models he had ripped from a crappy iPhone game and asked me what I could do with them, so I spent half an hour replacing dragons. I read the books as a kid, but hadn’t really even thought about the whole thing in years. It was just ​’what would be the funniest thing at the time?’.”