Shining Time Station was a show that aired on PBS from 1989 to 1997. It was created by Britt Allcroft and Rick Sigglekow as a means of introducing North American audiences to Thomas the Tank Engine. This show featured such memorable characters as Mr. Conductor, a magical eighteen-inch conductor who lived in the signal box of the station's mural and told Thomas' stories to the children who visited the station, Stacy Jones, the kind-hearted stationmistress, Schemer, the arcade manager who had many a get-rich-quick scheme up his sleeve, and a band of puppets who lived inside the jukebox and played songs for nickels. This classic series has not aired on television since 2000, when the Thomas and the Magic Railroad movie marked its final appearance, and while it had a few VHS releases, those are long out of print. As it has not had any official release on DVD or streaming services, the only way it can be watched is on YouTube, through various uploads of old recordings.

Unfortunately, Mattel, the company who owns the rights to the Thomas the Tank Engine franchise since their acquisition of HiT Entertainment in February 2012, has started blocking a select number of Shining Time Station episodes on YouTube due to them containing classic episodes of Thomas the Tank Engine. Since late 2017, Mattel has made many decisions that have hurt Thomas more than help. They pulled Thomas' TV show from PBS,  decreased the quality of Thomas' merchandise lines, made DVD releases more scarce, and made a spin-off that is more cartoony and less grounded in realism called All Engines Go!, which went completely against the vision of the late Rev. W. Awdry, author of The Railway Series books that served as the basis for Thomas' TV show. Britt Allcroft has officially denounced this spin-off in a Facebook post and requested that Mattel keep the spirit of the classic series alive for future generations. However, by blocking classic Thomas and Shining Time Station episodes on YouTube, they're disrespecting her wishes. People who saw the classic Thomas and Shining Time Station episodes as children want to be able to relive those classic memories and/or share them with their own children, and Mattel is denying them those chances. We need to show Mattel that Shining Time Station and classic Thomas are things that need to be shared with future generations and not something that should be lost to the sands of time.