Shining Time Station
The PBS show that brought Thomas the Tank Engine to America, wrapped in a small-town railway station where a tiny Mr. Conductor lived inside the mural. Ringo Starr played him first, and George Carlin, of all people, played him for the rest of the run.
Shining Time Station was created by British producer Britt Allcroft and American producer Rick Siggelkow as a way to bring Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends, which had debuted on British television in 1984, to American public television. Made for New York's WNET, it premiered on PBS on January 29, 1989, taped in New York for its first season and in Toronto afterward. Each episode dropped a couple of Thomas stories, themselves based on the Reverend W. Awdry's Railway Series books, into a live-action sitcom about a fictional station on the Indian Valley Railroad.
The station was run by Stacy Jones (Didi Conn), with a workshop, an arcade operated by the scheming comic-relief Schemer (Brian O'Connor), and a jukebox band of puppets. The stories came from Mr. Conductor, a tiny man who lived in a signal house inside the station mural. Ringo Starr, who was already narrating the British series, agreed to play him on camera for the first season. When he left in 1991, the producers replaced him with George Carlin, written in as the original's cousin. Only Conn and O'Connor returned for the retooled 1991 and 1993 seasons. Carlin told CBS This Morning in 1991 that the job gave him "a chance to exercise that part of me which is still young," and while Entertainment Weekly found his early episodes awkward, the Associated Press praised his "sweet, elfin Mr. Conductor."
The show was a gentle counterweight to faster kids' television. EW's Ken Tucker described it as "an old-fashioned show that creates a gentle, lulling atmosphere to convince children that life is fun and that trains are the way to travel." The opening credits rolled over footage of Union Pacific's steam locomotive 844, which is part of why the theme song still triggers a whole generation.
The series proper ended on June 11, 1993, followed by four hour-long primetime specials in 1995 and a six-episode Carlin spin-off, Mr. Conductor's Thomas Tales, in 1996. Reruns stayed on PBS until 1998, moved to Fox Family, and returned on Nick Jr. in 2000 to promote Thomas and the Magic Railroad, the feature film that borrowed the show's characters.
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