Posted by Brum Hatter on 28/2/2020, 9:50 am, in reply to "Q2 is Barrow."
The Diocese of Sodor and Man is a diocese of the Church of England. Originally much larger, today it covers just the Isle of Man and its adjacent islets. Today, the bishop's office is in Douglas and the cathedral is in Peel. The diocese is not generally called either "Sodor diocese" or "Man diocese". The Rev Awdry was a curate at the local church of St Nicholas, Kings Norton, Birmingham, and he knew the Bishop of Sodor and Man, a post which was often sourced from the Birmingham diocese. The Lickey Bank, just south of Kings Norton station, is the steepest main-line incline in Great Britain, a gradient of 1 in 37.7 for a continuous 2 miles, it is the hill that Gordon gets stuck on, and Edward has to go and give him a push. In real life there was an 0-10-0 banking engine called Big Bertha which pushed trains up the hill, it was scrapped in 1956.