It was a bit, the creator Wilbert Awdry was against the modernisation and the nationalisation of the british railways and would frequently push agenda’s in his Thomas series that was very anti-diesel, and then later very anti-electric. His works increasingly pandered towards his beliefs about current events:

Beginning in the 1950s, Awdry began to shift how he wrote the Railway Series and included the real-world element of the conflict between steam and diesel engines.[17] During the 1950s, the British Railways (BR) began to modernise the railway network, withdrawing their steam engines and replacing them with the modern diesel engine. While that was happening in the real world, in Awdry’s fictional universe, he “began more frequently referencing a place known as “The Other Railway”, often using it as a foil to his utopian Island of Sodor and treating it akin to a steam engine hell. “The Other Railway” represented B.R. and their callous scrapping of countless steam engines”.[17] That shifted the Railway Series from just telling fictional stories in the world Awdry created to paralleling the real world and using events that happened in real life.[17]

The lady who would later try to rein him in and make his stories more kid-friendly and made his works viable for television was met with total scorn by him for what he percieved to be bastardizing his works. He was not a friendly person.