MY SON is a train addict.

His obsession is affecting the whole family – but in a good way, I think.

It began about a year ago, when two-year-old Julian started watching Thomas And Friends, the British stop-motion animated train series on television.

Now, if you’re not a parent, it may be necessary to explain that the show is based on The Railway Series, a set of 26 books created by the Reverend W. V. Awdry in 1942. It chronicles the adventures of a group of cheeky yet compelling steam engines with facial expressions, on an island named Sodor.

Since then, Julian has devoted almost every waking moment to his Thomas And Friends die-cast trains and collection of books.

All day long, he lines up his trains on their tracks and whoosh, peep, puff and chug them around. At night, he dreams – and, sometimes, mutters in his sleep – about troublesome trucks, box cars and express trains.

I harness Thomas, the popular blue engine, and his friends for my own ends too.

I adopt Thomas-speak to coax him into doing things he would otherwise not do.

Taking a bath is “going to the washdown”, so that his “shiny red paintwork” can be cleaned and polished. When Julian needs to strap on a mask which administers asthma medication in vapour form, I tell him that he is about to turn into a steam engine before the “gassing” starts.

Instead of crying in terror, as he did in the past during the same treatment, he perks up and really enjoys pretending to be a steam engine.

But part of the reason why the Rev Awdry’s literary legacy has been able to be parlayed into huge commercial success lies in the complex analogy on spirituality and the innate resilience of the human soul that is contained within each simple story about the trains.

The engines got into trouble (read: collisions, derailment, running late) because of their too-human personality traits and desires like curiosity, vanity and pride.

“The important thing,” the Rev Awdry once said, “is that the engines are punished and forgiven – but never scrapped.”

Subconsciously, we all want to have tracks, station masters, railway controllers and other authority figures to guide us through the mess that is life.

One can even take it further and read the Thomas stories as a kind of philosophical exploration of free will. If the trains have to run on predetermined tracks, then can they be said to be exercising their own rational appetites, as opposed to merely carrying out divine fate?

As my son who turns three next month shows no sign of tiring of his Thomas stories, the Supportive Spouse and I are finding ourselves pondering the more esoteric implications of this boyhood pastime.

“There’s something I don’t get,” my husband said to me the other day over a bak kut teh lunch. “If Thomas and the other engines just steam around, doing whatever they like, then why do they even have drivers?”

I considered his point.

“Maybe the train is the Id (the unorganised part of the personality structure that seeks immediate gratification, pleasure and enjoyment),” I said, calling on my dime-store Freudian psychology.

“And the driver is the Ego (the organised part of the personality structure which helps us to organise our thoughts and make sense of them and the world around us).

“The driver may direct the engine but, sometimes, the baseness of the Id just gets the better of everyone?”

Come to think of it, maybe that’s what parents are – drivers to guide the unchecked whims and tantrums of all small children.

Ah, no wonder they call it training.

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