Britt Allcroft, who has died aged 81, brought the Rev Wilbert Awdry’s adventures in his Railway Series of books to television in Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends – and turned it into a global phenomenon earning her millions of pounds.
She read the books, first published in the 1940s, while making a 1979 Central Office of Information film about a resurgence of interest in steam railways, which included interviewing the locomotives’ creator and filming on the Bluebell heritage railway in West Sussex.
