BMW Owner Turns Car Into Thomas the Tank Engine, Police Not Amused

A U.K. driver is very popular with small children, but not necessarily with the local police after he illegally transformed his car into a spot-on replica of Thomas the Tank Engine.

According to The Examiner, noted local eccentric Jake Mangle-Wurzel, a 78-year-old self-styled “King of the Eccentrics” who appears to enjoy modifying cars, was stopped by police while driving his Thomas the Tank Engine car  on a local highway when police stopped him for riving a car with unauthorized modifications that might be dangerous, or might impede the driver’s vision. Making modifications to a car requires an insurance company to be notified, and certain type of modifications are not legal.

The West Yorkshire Police tweeted a photo of the Thomas the Tank Engine car and reported that it had been stopped for construction/use offenses, prompting commenters to respond with dozens of train puns and several parents to moan that the Thomas the Tank Engine theme song was now stuck in their heads.

One Twitter commenter  asked the police why they bothered to pixelate the license plate, because nobody’s going to mistake this car for any other vehicle.

Thomas the Tank
Image: Giphy

This is not Mangle-Wurzel’s only weird car modification, though. His regular use Kia has a full-sized toilet mounted to the roof, and that one has reportedly been authorized and is street-legal, though one hopes the toilet is just decorative. He has another one with a sink on top of it, and a car covered in faux fur that looks like a giant, hairy dog.

The Thomas car might not have been street legal to drive, but it sure must have delighted the heck out of a lot of West Yorkshire children, though. But now a lot of parents are going to have a hard time explaining to their kids why their car is just a normal, boring car that doesn’t look like Thomas the Tank Engine at all.

What do you think of the Thomas the Tank Engine car? Let us know in the comments.

(Image: Twitter / WYP_RPU)

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