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deepdriver·

The steam locomotives (scroll down for color photos) look remarkably like Thomas the Tank Engine:

http://www.dzd-ussr.ru/towns/gorky/foto1-eng.html

Those photos are from the late 1990s, so maybe the resemblance is intentional.

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Thomas the Tank Engine is virtually unknown in Russia, so I doubt it

Way more plausible is that Thomas the Tank Engine was drawn based on how real world trained looked like.

Yes - he's drawn based on a specific kind of tank engine from the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway (E2 class). There's not a huge similarity with the engine in the photo except that they're both small and painted in a similar shade of blue.

Thomas's prototype causes problems for preserved railway lines in the UK, incidentally. 'Day Out With Thomas' events (where an engine 'dresses' as Thomas to run trains) are very popular, but there are actually zero preserved E2s, so they all look a bit wrong. If Rev Awdry had picked something more common (like a Jinty[0], say) to base Thomas on, there would be loads of nearly exact copies to go around...

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LMS_Fowler_Class_3F

That's incorrect. The show has been regularly broadcast since the 1990's. But it's not that big in Russia that people will deliberately style steam locomotives to look like Thomas or Gordon.

Other than being a steam engine in the same shade of light blue .. no? Different number of wheels, and without the characteristic rectangular water tanks on the side of the boiler that makes it a tank engine.

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