J On The Spectrum - The Train Builder that Built My Childhood (Guest Star: David Payne)

Crucial to my early childhood development as a person on the autism spectrum, one show reigned over them all: Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends.

The Classic Series of Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends, which used model trains and miniature effects instead of animation, had a distinguishable effect on learning many crucial human emotions and in some cases, persevering and excelling in my career. Since it was just a narrator talking and everyone's face stood still and had zero movement, but the narrator says how the character is feeling, I learned emotions at such an early age and wouldn't have gotten by through grade school so easily if I didn't grow up with Thomas.

Today, I have the privilege of talking to one of the very people that helped out with the decision to make Thomas the way it was instead of being a cartoon like everyone else. David Payne is a British special effects supervisor who built all the model trains and their movements for the first two seasons of the show. Afterwards for the rest of the classic series run, David Mitton was in charge of the operation. Thomas was made in the UK and not in the United States because the stories that Thomas was based on were written by a British man named Rev. W. Awdry, intended to entertain his son Christopher, and the books themselves, The Railway Series, were distributed in the UK. When the show became a hit, Thomas went global, which is how I discovered Thomas in the US back in the 90s when I was just a toddler.

When I say special effects, I don't mean done with computers, I mean tangible illusions like a magician with a slight of hand. David has worked on 4,000 commercials, some of them meant to be run in America. He now is semi-retired, sometimes building stuff for commercials and art installations, other times he's now an ice dancer.