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Shining Time: My Early Years

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 The Beginning I remember driving home with my parents to the farm. It was late at night and I remember being in the car, with the first few episodes of Shining Time Station  floating in my mind. I don't know if I had just watched it for the first time or if I watched it when we came home - but something stuck. I remember my Grandma, Betty, telling me about the show for the first time. "It takes place in a magical train station", she said. "There's a puppet band inside a jukebox that plays railroad songs". And, of course, there was Thomas . Being about 4 years old at the time, I was already well into Thomas The Tank Engine & Friends . I remember renting the VHSs of "Thomas Gets Tricked" and "James Learns A Lesson" from the video store and library early on. That obsession was sealed. STS was something new. It involved people: people who felt, cried, got angry, created things, and tried their best to keep a small station on the Indian V...
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The STS Jukebox

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"Where dreams can come true..." Set photos: Rick Siggelkow The world of Shining Time Station always felt safe to me. I remember spending countless hours wondering about the sets from the show. I would dream about being on set, under the lights, chatting with the actors... I never thought a piece of that would somehow be recoverable. It took several months of pursuing, convincing, driving, funding, scrutinizing, and a whole lot of blood, sweat, and tears. And here we are. Many of you asked about how the story unfolded. Here it is. In late September of 2020, I was mindlessly Google image searching STS and I stumbled upon a Twitter post with a screencap of an Instagram post. A fellow in Ontario (who will remain unnamed and be hereon referred to as “the fellow”) stated that he believed that the jukebox he had purchased for a project was in fact the very prop from STS. I could not believe it. My heart stopped. I immediately hopped on Instagram, commenting and DM’ing the fellow a...
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