Reading to your children is one of the great joys of parenthood. And it lasts until exactly the day your children discover Thomas the Tank Engine, at which point you start developing mysterious headaches come bedtime and, Oh darling, I know you're only three, but you can probably work this one out yourself from the pictures while I lie on the floor with the duvet over my face. Tricky word? It's probably "coupling", or maybe "gauge". Shhhh. Mummy's resting down here.

The awful truth is: kids love Thomas. They love him so much that Barbie-hawker Mattel has bought the entire stable of Hit Entertainment, apparently mostly in order to get their corporate fingers on the Rev W Awdry's coal-powered progeny. They love him, even though the island of Sodor belongs to a far-off postwar world where things like "coal" and "steam" and "public transport" – unimaginable to the modern child-brain – were still comprehensible concepts. And they love him, despite the fact that his stories are the crazed authoritarian fantasies of a father figure who would make the sternest Freudian blanch.

In the Railway Series, mechanical whimsy (Look! A steam train! With a face!) is balanced by a taste for punishment that is both brutal and peremptory. The very first book in the Railway Series includes The Sad Story of Henry – in which a sentient engine is immured in a tunnel as punishment for being a tiny bit vain about keeping his paint job out of the rain.

There are few more chilling parental moments than looking on that last page, with Henry's imploring eyes peeping out over the wall that the Fat Controller (to all attachment-anxiety-invoking intents and purposes, Henry's own father) has erected in order to teach the poor engine that trying to stay dry is a wicked, wicked business. And then you turn to your hopeful youngster and say: "That's the end. Sleep tight!"

And it's not just Henry who receives the Reverend's fossil-fuelled justice. Sodor experiences its own miniature version of the cold war with the arrival of Bulgy, a red (yes, red, just like a Soviet) double-decker bus who cries "Free the roads!" and anticipates the revolutionary overthrow of rail transport.

Bulgy gets trapped under a bridge, painted green and converted into a henhouse. That's what you get for being a blow-hard socialist. But in terms of class warfare, Bulgy's doom has nothing on what's done to the truculent Troublesome Truck who refuses to learn his place during one of the later stories. Having caused intolerable levels of confusion and delay, the offending blue-collar worker is coupled (see how much I've learnt about railway management from these terrible bedtimes?) between two engines pulling in opposite directions and yanked until he flies apart.

The climactic frame of that story, with a wincing truck-face lying splintered on the ground, is one of the most disturbing in children's literature. Is he dead? Does he suffer? Could he be recombined – and if he was, would he feel the thirst for vengeance against those who tried to murder him?

Such questions of existential enginism are never answered, because by this stage in the series, the Rev was more interested in nerding out over various heritage railways and attempting to preserve them in fiction than he was in maintaining a consistent fictional world of developing characters. And so the number of similar-coloured-but-slightly-differently-proportioned engines begins to puff uncontrollably towards infinity.

That, of course, is where the lure for Mattel lies. Even without the tender pressure of a merchandising arm leaning on him, Awdry was a natural expander of intellectual property – and that was before anyone was gender-savvy enough to note the dearth of girl engines and start multiplying the catalogue by painting eyelashes onto each model and distributing them through the Early Learning Centre.

Of the Awdry original lady characters, the wimpering, speed-averse carriages Annie and Clarabel are worse than no female role models at all, while tramcar Toby's companion Henrietta doesn't even get the dignity of a face as she chugs along behind her master. And while that lot demonstrate their feminine forbearance, we're supposed to celebrate Thomas himself, an incompetent little dipstick of an engine who's constantly bashing into buffers and rolling off the rails.

In fact, the sooner that blue bastard is carted off for scrap, the better for parents everywhere. No more forced laughter as – oh ho ho! – Thomas once again causes a cheeky logistical disaster for his colleagues by running a red light. No more scouring eBay for mythical engines from the narrow-gauge stories.

And no more having to explain to your children that no, diesel isn't actually the fuel of the devil, it's that the Rev W Awdry inexplicably found solid fuel more seductive than Sophia Loren. (Though, had Sophia Loren had a tender and a dome, he may have felt differently.) My children's Thomas days are now behind them, but even so, I'd prefer the dark of a bricked-up tunnel to ever reading Awdry's opus again.

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