Written by Peter Bently Published by Hodder Children’s Books
From the winner of the Roald Dahl Funny Prize comes a pacy rhyming adventure, perfect for any child who loves trains.
When a naughty little mouse steals cheese from the station master, a battle between cat and mouse follows! But they put their differences aside when a big, red steam train comes tearing down the track straight towards them! Exquisitely illustrated, this cat and mouse chase is a truly memorable ride that will be good for many repeated trips.
'This is a book that children will really enjoy... It's a book that will give children's sense of adventure a boost up the bottom.' RHINO READS
Find Out More!
Click on the suitcase to find out how I went about illustrating this book
A rough sketch for the opening spread featuring Caruthers the station master’s cat.
The train is coming!
🚂
The train is coming! 🚂
The End
Can you spot Carruthers and the mouse in this illustration? This image appears at the front and back pages of the book which are called ‘endpapers’.
TEA TIME!
Pour yourself a mug of tea and maybe cut a slice of cheese to nibble on whilst I show you some sketches and other stuff that isn’t in the book.
Setting the mood. Before sketching any story out, I like to do preliminary sketches of the main characters and the environments to see how they all fit together.
Early concept work including some designs and layouts which didn’t appear in the final book.
Points of view. Before I started sketching the pages for the stories out, I work out how the events unfold and where they happen in and around the station. This helps me plan my compositions and viewpoints when making my first rough drawings. I then produce very small sketches called thumbnails which help me work out how the illustrations can work with the flow of the story. I draw at a much smaller scale than the finished illustrations will be so I don’t get too bogged down with the detail which I will develop when I work on full-sized sketches.
Illustrator’s Notes
Stationmaster Pete might enjoy cheese with his tea but my preference is a biscuit of some kind. Preferably one that can be dunked without dissolving into a soggy mess. Many cups of tea and various biscuits were consumed whilst I illustrated this book.
Hornby Train Sets. Like most young boys, I had loved toy trains and my dad started to make a huge railway diorama when we moved to Cornwall when I was ten. Living in the west country meant that we had to have GWR (Great Western Railway) locomotives of course. I still have a tank engine like the one below. I also have a locomotive called ‘Albert Hall’.
My Cat Tiggers. This is me, my dad and our cat ‘Tiggers’. The photo was taken in our back garden where we lived in Chesham when I was a boy. We moved to Caversham when I was about six but Tiggers escaped from the removal van on the day we moved and we couldn’t find him anywhere. A few days later he turned up at the old house so we went to get him and transfer him safely to our new house. He must have had a cat compass or something to travel such a long way back to where he’d started.
Tiggers was of course my inspiration for Carruthers, the cat in the story.
