Wednesday 31 December 2014

A Year in Review - 2014

A Year in Review - 2014

As it is the last day of 2014 we are going to look and reflect upon what we have done this year. To do this we are going to take a month by month look at the year using pictures and links to the relevant videos. So without further ado let's get started. 

February

16th 

We kicked off 2014 with our first video in February. In this video we had a look at The Merit Big Big Train Set.This is a very nostalgic set from around 1985, the same year as the accompanying music. The video proved popular and gained over 11,000 views and over 20 likes. 

Check out the Gallery page for more pictures.

17th

The next day we followed up the previous video with a collection of out takes and deleted scenes from the original filming. It's always fun to see what you were not meant to see, but sadly this video didn't get many views in comparison to the main one. 
More pictures are available via the Gallery page.

March

3rd

To commemorate 75 years since the Mallard set the steam locomotive speed record of 126mph the National Railway Museum arranged for Mallard and her 5 remaining sisters to gather for one last time in the two museums. I was lucky enough to see the engines at the Locomotion museum in Shildon and shared some of my pictures from the day in a video. It was fantastic to see six iconic engines all in one place, though very difficult to get any good photographs! 



Check out our Gallery page for more pictures.

15th

Shortly after seeing all six remaining Gresely A4 Pacifics I had the great pleasure of seeing 4464 Bittern pulling into Carlisle train station. It was fantastic to see and even if I do say so myself, I was in the perfect place when the train pulled in! 
Check out our Gallery page for more pictures.

June

24th

In this month we revealed that we had a copy of  The Sad Story of Henry and Other Stories VHS with a green video cassette. This video sparked quite a bit of interest and was our first VHS collection video for a very long time. We do plan to make a video showing our entire VHS collection in 2015. 
Check out our Gallery for more pictures.

July

5th

We actually made a video of the Bandai Cartridge Viewer on our old channel (Cyril227ify) about three years ago, but this time around we had the original packaging. The cartridge viewer is a very interesting addition to our collection. It features a cartridge containing a tape with the story "Down the Mine" and a viewer. The cartridge simply slots into the viewer and your turn the handle to move the tape. One of our promo pictures was actually made using an illustration from the box and the same illustration is currently in use as our Twitter cover photo! 

Check out our Gallery for more pictures

August

2nd 

In this month we showcased a train set in a Garden Centre. This was an enjoyable video to make and apparently quite enjoyable to watch, the video gained over 500 views and 15 likes. 


Check out our Gallery for more pictures

7th

This is another video recreated from our old channel (Cyril227ify) featuring our collection of the Johnny Morris singles. Take a look at the video and remind yourself of just how many of these singles were produced!

September

23rd

This was the first of a few videos to come featuring the Rev.W.Awdry record of 1957. This first video allowed you to get a close in depth look at the record and considered some of the adversing and publications that mentioned this incredibly rare recording. 

27th

After four days we released the first side of the record "Edward's Day Out", narrated by Wilbert Awdry with accompanying steam engine sounds. The audio from this record had been released two years previously by Youtube user The Railway Stories Audio Collection, the audio featured in his videos he had actually restored so it is comparatively high quality. 

29th

We released the second side a couple of days later. We also released a blog post that discussed the information that myself and The Railway Stories Audio Collection had discovered. 
Also view the pictures on our Gallery page


The Thomas Wikia featured the first side of the record, thanks guys!

December

17th & 18th

As a special early Christmas surprise we uploaded both sides of the Question Time With Sir Topham Hatt Cassette released exclusively for Thomas Club Members in the late 1990s. This had been uploaded three years previously on our old channel (Cyril227ify) but we felt it was time for a revamp! 


Check out our Gallery page to view the pictures and download both sides of the audio cassette.

25th, 26th, 27th, 28th, & 29th

Our Christmas special last year was of course the Ladybird audio collection, this was a difficult task to beat. The Ladybird audios proved to be very popular. This year our Christmas special was releasing all of the William Middleton illustrations, sadly the excitement wasn't as great as we were hoping as the illustrations were already released earlier this month. Still it was good to see them paired with the Rev.W.Awdry.



It has been a very busy year for ThomasTankCollectables and we would like to take the time to say a big thank you to everyone who as supported us over the years and made all of our work worthwhile! Thanks guys, hope you all have a fantastic new year!

Please fell free to leave a comment or if you want to get in touch send us an email via the address below. 

Wednesday 17 December 2014

Question Time with Sir Topham Hatt Cassette

Question Time with Sir Topham Hatt Cassette

Today we released the first side of the Question Time with Sir Topham Hatt cassette released exclusively for members of The Thomas Club in 1998. We previously uploaded this audio on our old channel a few years ago and it proved very popular, therefore we thought it was due a revamp! 


This time the audio is much higher quality and the video is considerably better! We recreated the original cover to fit a widescreen video. To do this we combined the illustrations and text from the original cassette cover onto a single image and we the think the result is quite good.Please feel free to leave a comment below. 

The 'Question Time with Sir Topham Hatt' cassette is very hard to get hold of now due to the fact that it was released exclusively for Thomas Club members. An even rarer edition of this cassette is the 2000 re-release which features the new logo.







Here is a scan of the re-released cassette cover to give you a comparison, the content is identical. We hope you enjoy both sides of the cassette and please feel free to leave a comment here or on the video!








You can listen to the audio from the first side here:

Side two is now available as well!



Monday 20 October 2014

300 Facebook Likes

300 Facebook Likes

We would like to say a big thank you to everyone that has liked our Facebook page and interacts with the things we post. It has been great fun running the page and we hope you enjoy our content and continue to do so for many years to come! We really appreciate your support.


Make sure you keep following us on all the various social media sites we use, particularly the Youtube channel and the blog! Once again thanks guys! Any questions or comments, please feel free to contact us.

ThomasTankCollectables 
Youtube:http://www.youtube.com/user/ThomasCollectables?feature=watch  

Tuesday 23 September 2014

The Rev.W.Awdry Record

The Rev.W.Awdry Record

In 1957, 12 years after the release of the first book in the Railway Series which was of course the Three Railway Engines, Chiltern Records LTD. released a 7in Long Playing single featuring the two first stories from the aforementioned book. This was the first and last time published recordings were released of the Rev.W.Awdry narrating his own stories. 

ThomasTankCollectables Archive 2014
The story telling was accompanied by steam engine sounds, which as you will hear are quite loud! The recording was only ever released on this record and not many copies of this record were made. The record was advertised in various merchandise of the time. Below is a fantastic advertisement featuring both the record and more prominently the press out model books of the late 1950s and 1960s. 

Jim Gratton - www.pegnsean.net
Sadly the record was not very successful and no other records were made, which is a shame, it would have nice to hear other stories told the way the author intended. An extract from the book "Sounds of the Railways and Their Recordings" released in 1981 explains why this particular record was not very successful. 
Sounds of the Railways and Their Recordings 1981

This mentions a small production run, suggesting that the record was not only produced on a small scale but also only produced in one year. All this makes this record very scarce and a fantastic addition to anyone's collection. We will be releasing both sides (unrestored) on our Youtbe channel and have already released a short video summarising the points discussed in more detail in this post. If you would still like to know more, head over to our OneDrive folder linked below, where you can find the pictures featured in this article and in our Youtube video. 

With thanks to The Railway Stories Collection for helping me find information about this record. You can head over to his channel to see his digitally remastered upload of this record. 


ThomasTankCollectables Rev.W.Awdry Record Video

ThomasTankCollectables OneDrive FolderDigitally remastered audio supplied by The Railway Stories Collection


Thursday 28 August 2014

Ladybird Audios Follow Up

Ladybird Audios Follow Up 

Our biggest project of last year was of course releasing all 26 Ladybird stories for the first time in one place. It was a lot of work converting the cassettes to MP3 and putting the videos together, but we managed it. We released the stories in the run up to Christmas and the project was called the ThomasTankCollectables 28 days of Christmas, it was essentially a TTC Christmas calender!  


It was certainly worth the effort, the videos gained a combined: 

25,545 views
179 likes

A big thank you to everyone that watched and liked the videos; makes all the effort worthwhile! Our next video will be a new cassette collection video, as the last one was done in 2012 and things have changed since then. So keep an eye on our channel for that video. In the meantime please enjoy our latest videos and of course the Ladybird Audio Collection. 

The Complete Ladybird Collection

View the PDF