Greetings and a Happy New Year to all our listeners and supporters - who would have thought 2024 has come so quickly!
We know things have been a little quiet on the main podcast front, but we hope that Tales From The Rails and Time To Shine have been entertaining.
Mike and Adrian especially have been a force to be reckoned with and have provided an insightful retrospective on Shining Time Station from reviews, discussions and interviews with cast from the show.
It's quite astonishing to think that we started Season 8 of the podcast in 2022 and has been the longest running to date, to which a lot of people ask why.
The plain simple answer is that the three of us are quite busy people with full time careers and studies in the media and arts industries, which doesn't give us the time we once had to produce the podcast.
However, this is not the end.
With about two episodes left, Season 8 should come to a close soon.
This season particularly has taken longer to put together because we now have many other elements that have been combined (Loco Nation, Lachlan's Model Train Corner and special interviews) which we plan to release very soon.
We have one or two surprises in store, including a special Writer's Workshop one-off, featuring Tom Denham, Michael White and TheBuriedTruck answering the biggest questions when it comes to writing official and fan Thomas content.
One of the big reasons we haven't released Model Train Corner and Loco Nation as separate podcasts is that we wanted to give all content to start with a fair opportunity to be heard by all but also create a fun Thomas variety show for the podcast platform.
While this has been great fun, it does take a lot of time.
Moving forward into Season 9, we plan to continue some of these spin-offs and special episodes as self-contained releases like Time To Shine to allow all Thomas and RWS fans alike to enjoy a variety of content.
The main podcast will return to original form with the three host structure reviewing three to four episodes of the main Thomas TV series as we have done from Seasons 1-7.
While we can't give an exact date of when this will be as we don't want to diminish expectation, these can be heard some time in early 2024.
On behalf of the main trio, we want to thank those who have listened, reached out, engaged, collaborated and supported us so far on our journey and who manage to keep us (dare we say it) right on track!
Looking forward to bringing you more content this new year.
Dry rails and good running,
Connor, Denham and Parry.