The rising levels of market-garden traffic of this kind encouraged the Great Eastern to build a tramway-type line in the 1880s along the flat canalside route between Wisbech and Upwell, which was operated by odd-looking steam engines encased in boxy wooden housings. This farm-gate branch was well known to a local clergyman, the Rev. W. Awdry, who represented one of its locomotives in Toby the Tram Engine (1952), the seventh book in his Thomas the Tank Engine series – with the curious result that Chinese factories now turn out model versions of the long-lost engines of this railway backwater to
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