Hello everyone! 🙂

Welcome to ‘Bradley’s Basement’ blog and I’m Tim Bradley!

It’s Day 7 of ‘Bradley’s Basement’s Advent Calendar 2025.

This time, it’s not about Thomas in this ‘Thomas the Tank Engine’ episode!

‘JAMES AND THE COACHES’

This episode is a James-focused episode. It’s based on the first two stories of the third ‘Railway Series’ book ‘James and the Red Engine’, including ‘James and the Top-Hat’ and ‘James and the Bootlace’. Interesting the first two stories were combined as one episode.

In this episode, James is having to learn things whilst being on the Island of Sodor. The episode makes a reference to the accident that James had with trucks in ‘Thomas and the Breakdown Train’. Although, it’s claimed that the accident happened on ‘his first day’.

That’s a contradiction in terms of the TV series’ continuity, as James has been in the TV series since the first episode. Unless you want to consider the first seven episodes taking place within a day, but that’s wrong as we’ve had night-time scenes in previous episodes.

In ‘the Top-Hat’ portion of the episode, James accidentally lets off steam and showers water onto the Fat Controller’s new top hat. Edward also pulls James behind him when pulling a train from a station. Not sure why Edward had to pull James at all in this case. 😐

In ‘the Bootlace’ portion of the episode, James becomes rough with five coaches that have the same design as Annie and Clarabel. It causes a leak in a coach’s brake pipe and the driver and fireman decide to patch the leak with newspaper and a leather bootlace. 😐

Thanks for reading and watching!

Check out what Day 7 of my ‘Bradley’s Basement’s Advent Calendars for 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024 were about!

Bye for now!

Tim 🙂