Well, this one’s been coming for a while. When I started my Death Guard army, one of the first things I did was got a sculpt of Thomas the Tank Engine that I could use to green-stuff-ify an old Chaos Rhino into the very useful engine we all know and love. Since I’ve been running my Death Guard as The Inexorable, and running them as vehicle-heavy, this just felt like something I naturally had to do as I continued to grow and evolve the army from here.

This time I wanted to do more than just add the Thomas face to the model, though – I decided with the Plagueburst Crawler I picked up that I was going to lean a lot harder into the “Thomas” theme with a color modification that would make this model distinct from the rest of my army. Sure, it breaks up the uniformity a bit, but I also think it makes the reference and the joke more obvious and…I think I stuck with enough other elements of my Death Guard painting formula that it still fits in enough not to be jarring.

This model’s special to me for more reasons than just that, though – while he got banged up a little in the process, Thomas here was one of the models that I brought home with me to Ontario to visit family. My nephew, who I met for the first time on this trip, decided that Thomas’ cannon was the perfect size for crayons, and he was absolutely right. One of my favorite memories from that trip was watching him pretend to drive the tank around and fire crayons out of it across the kitchen table, and Thomas still smells like crayons to this day.

Last, just for the sake of some extra terrain, I took an old Sir Topham Hat miniature that my parents sent me from when I was much younger and I decided to stick it to a terrain piece as an objective marker. Even in the 41st Millenium, he still looks out with pride at Thomas, who has become a very useful engine indeed in the service of Chaos.