"Criticism of sexism in the Thomas stories dates to the 1980s, when the Birmingham City Council banned the books from its libraries. Britt Allcroft, who formerly produced the TV series now seen in 130 countries, dismissed the allegations back then, saying, 'Thomas and friends are neither male nor female. They're magic.'" -- http://www.thestar.com/life/parent/2009/12/10/why_thomas_is_a_really_useless_engine_for_girls.html
"Thomas and those friends are trains that toil away endlessly on the Isle of Sodor – which seems to be forever caught in British colonial times – and, on its surface, the show seems to impart good moral lessons about hard work and friendship. But if you look through the steam rising up from the coal-powered train stacks, you realize that the pretty puffs of smoke are concealing some pretty twisted, anachronistic messages." -- http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/22/thomas-the-tank-engine-children-parents
"when your role on earth is to 'research and write about the intersection of social justice and pop culture'…Thomas the Tank Engine, a lovely little story put together by a village clergyman with a wide-eyed imagination and a son in need of comfort, becomes a brutal allegory for all that is wrong with the world." -- http://www.nationalreview.com/article/383541/defense-thomas-tank-engine-charles-c-w-cooke
"In the Thomas the Tank Engine books there are almost no female engines. The only female characters are an annoyance, a nuisance and in some cases a danger to the functioning of the railway." -- http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/10532989/Thomas-the-Tank-Engine-needs-more-female-trains-Labour-MP-says.html
"Thomas the Tank Engine is not a capitalist stooge. To the contrary, socialism is alive and well--at least on the Island of Sodor. Sodor's railroads are all nationalized. That is why Sir Topham Hatt...is called 'The Fat Controller.' Thomas the Tank Engine is a thus a loyal and subservient employee of the State who wants only to be Really Useful." -- http://blog.pff.org/archives/2009/12/cheer_up_canada_thomas_the_tank_engine_is_not_a_co.html
"When those stories were first written [in the 1940s] it wasn’t a forelock-tugging age, but there were limits and you have got to have somebody in charge. I think he saw the characters as a family, in which the Fat Controller was the boss, the father figure, and all the engines were the children." -- http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/11602184/Christopher-Awdry-why-sour-Lefties-are-wrong-about-Thomas-the-Tank-Engine.html
"The great trick of Sir Topham is to employ engines who essentially evoke the image of the New Soviet man in the service of a proto-capitalist, semi-feudal enterprise." -- The economics and politics of Thomas the Tank Engine - Bull Market - Medium
"[Sir Topham] Hatt, however endearing he may be, is the misbegotten result of a society in which aristocracy and capital are too closely linked…the show champions neither socialism nor oligarchy, but serves by (bad) example to champion a sound, open, properly functioning market." -- http://prawfsblawg.blogs.com/prawfsblawg/2008/07/the-law-and-eco.html
"AI research on the Island of Sodor is massively ahead of the rest of the world. The trains on Sodor have been designed to understand natural language, solve problems for themselves, recognize new situations, and even have emotions and personalities…Sodor shouldn’t be a quaint island whose dominant industry is rails. It should be the new Silicon Valley, using its advanced artificial intelligence research as its primary economic export." -- http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2013/01/27/the-baffling-economics-of-the-island-of-sodor/