Britt Allcroft, creator of the beloved Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends children’s TV series, has died.

The British-born producer died last week in Santa Monica, Calif., at 81.

The death was confirmed by Brannon Carty, the creator of a documentary about Thomas fandom and a friend of the TV producer’s. No cause of death was given.

Thomas started out as a character in a series of books dating back to the 1940s by Rev. Wilbert Awdry, an English Anglican minister and train enthusiast. Awdry’s The Railway Series revolved around a cast of anthropomorphic trains, including Thomas and his friends Gordon, James and Percy, all chuffing along on the imaginary island of Sodor.

But Allcroft made Thomas an international sensation, starting in the mid-1980s with her TV adaptation narrated by Ringo Starr.

The series, which was later renamed Thomas & Friends, ran for more than three decades and featured other famous narrators such as George Carlin and Alec Baldwin. It has spawned TV spin-offs, movies, stage productions and a ton of merch.

Television producer and director Britt Allcroft in 1973.

Express/Getty Images/Hulton Archive

hide caption

toggle caption

Express/Getty Images/Hulton Archive

Advertisement

And the appeal goes beyond kids. The 2023 documentary An Unlikely Fandom is about grownups’ passion for the little blue locomotive.

Filmmaker Brannon Carty — a lifelong Thomas fan — said he got to know Allcroft in her final years.

“She was just an incredible woman who was still a child at heart,” Carty said in an interview with NPR. “But she was a businesswoman at the same time. So, she understood what children wanted, and also knew how to sell it.” 

Allcroft was born in 1943 in Worthing, a town on England’s south coast.

Beyond Thomas, her 1990s animated series Magic Adventures of Mumfie, about a sweet little gray elephant and his friends, was a particular hit.

“I wanted to do something very different from Thomas that would be very magical and epic and hopefully have lots of music in it, and would, in the same way as Thomas, help give children love, and security, and inspiration, and comfort, and fun,” Allcroft told NPR in a 2013 interview.

Allcroft also said she aimed to create shows that gave children an antidote to hectic modern life.

“Children, they’re multidimensional,” she said. “And they still like that time where they can be with their stories, be with their characters, and feel that they’re not being pushed.”

Thomas the Tank Engine arrives for Thomas & Friends: A Day Out with Thomas Tour at Strasburg Rail Road Museum in September 2014 in Lancaster County, Pa.

Lisa Lake/Getty Images for HIT Entertainment

Advertisement

hide caption

toggle caption

Lisa Lake/Getty Images for HIT Entertainment

Advertisement

Upon arrival at the family’s home, the team was shown into the kitchen. A child, who was three, the youngest of four home-schooled siblings, peeked from behind her mother’s legs, looking up shyly. She wore a baggy Minnie Mouse shirt and went to perch between her grandparents on a banquette, watching everyone take their seats around the dining table.

“Let’s start from the very beginning,” Dr. Tucker said after the paperwork had been signed by Misty, the child’s 28-year-old mother. “It all began with the puzzle piece?”

A few months earlier, mother and child had been looking at a wooden puzzle of the United States, with each state represented by a cartoon of a person or object. Misty’s daughter pointed excitedly at the jagged piece representing Illinois, which had an abstract illustration of Abraham Lincoln.

“That’s Pom,” her daughter exclaimed. “He doesn’t have his hat on.”

This was indeed a drawing of Abraham Lincoln without his hat, but more important, there was no name under the image indicating who he was. Following weeks of endless talk about “Pom” bleeding out after being hurt and being carried to a too-small bed — which the family had started to think could be related to Lincoln’s assassination — they began to consider that their daughter had been present for the historical moment. This was despite the family having no prior belief in reincarnation, nor any particular interest in Lincoln.

On the drive to Amherst, Dr. Tucker confessed his hesitation in taking on this particular case — or any case connected to a famous individual. “If you say your child was Babe Ruth, for example, there would be lots of information online,” he said. “When we get those cases, usually it’s that the parents are into it. Still, it’s all a little strange to be coming out of a three-year-old’s mouth. Now if she had said her daughter was Lincoln, I probably wouldn’t have made the trip.”

Lately, Dr. Tucker has been giving the children picture tests. “Where we think we know the person they’re talking about, we’ll show them a picture from that life, and then show them another picture — a dummy picture — from somewhere else, to see if they can pick out the right one,” he said. “You have to have a few pictures for it to mean anything. I had one where the kid remembered dying in Vietnam. I showed him eight pairs of pictures and a couple of them he didn’t make any choice on, but the others he was six out of six. So, you know, that makes you think. But this girl is so young, that I don’t think we can do that.”