My name is Cyrus, and I’m the webmaster for this site. I want to express how happy I am to finally be able to share this project with the world. I hope this site makes people appreciate how much care and craft went into Thomas the Tank Engine, and that more people will be aware of the bigger picture of the brand, rough edges and all. Plans for a Thomas the Tank Engine toy cataloging website like those of other famous toy brands have been discussed well over a decade by Louis and Fred. Their contributions and advice on this project has been invaluable and I hope what we have put together so far is what they had in mind.
I say “so far” because this project is far from done. It probably never will be done because of the range and time Thomas has lasted, as well as the influence from and on other characters and design it is connected to. We intend to keep adding new pages and tidying up current ones so our information is accurate and we can be proud to present them. However our work is not easy, we do not use a website builder but instead coded this website in HTML from scratch. Because of this everything takes a fair bit of time to do and errors are common. We try to catch them all but we do miss some.
We want your feedback on the website, we appreciate any input we can get, whether it is positive, negative, on something we missed, appreciation for a detail, a question about the content on the site, or if you have something you want to contribute. You can contact us with our email tangentiallythomas@gmail.com, or you can also reach us on our Twitter (does anyone call it X?) @tangent_thomas.
I will leave some answers to what I assume will be frequently asked questions about the site.
- Q: Why are you doing this? A: We want to show appreciation for these less than recognized pieces of art, sometimes for their successes, and other times for what lessons they teach as mistakes. There is a very interesting bigger picture to Thomas that has yet to be told.
- Q: Why did you not use the standard MediaWiki formatting? A: We understand that MediaWiki is the established standard for anyone documenting and archiving on websites, however it was immediately clear to use that this would not suit our needs. For one thing, building from scratch allows us to have more freedom with every part of our website. We tried our best to make things more fun by matching style guides on some pages and other ways. Another is that we wanted consistency in how we lay out our pages. Sure, we could have an entire page dedicated to a complete playset with all its contents and variations, but for a single accessory there isn’t a whole lot to say. This brought us to our current solution which is a gallery format with the necessary information directly surrounding it. This brings about some other problems, but we believe this is the best solution to formatting the content we are dealing with.
- Q: What’s with the colors? Thomas is blue and red and yellow. Not white and green. Are you colorblind? A: We stick to the white and green color scheme because it fits with the theme of our site better. The colors are based off of Learning Curve Toy’s Thomas & Friends Wooden Railway James with Team Colors from the Adventures of James multipack(LC99134/LC99145). It is a very eye-catching toy with a lot of unique decoration and detail. This is all in spite of the toy being based off what is a very dull children’s show episode. We appreciate that toys can be adapted outside from less than perfect source material into something excellent.
- Q: Do you make any money off this site? A: No, we decided against ads or affiliate links in favor of keeping our pages clean and simple. We have seen what has happened to Fandom/Wikia with screen blocking ads making many hours of work by dedicated individuals completely unusable. We would like to avoid that as much as possible. With that said, this means we are paying for this site out of own pocket. Using HostGator this site costs about $150 a year to keep up, and that’s if we don’t hit our data limit. If there is sufficient interest we may go through with some fun concepts for raising the funds to keep this site as a resource for all.
- Q: I know everything about this niche topic that is tangentially related to Thomas the Tank Engine. Can I contribute? A: Yes please! We are always looking for people with experience outside of our own to help out. There’s also just a ton of work that we need to get done. Just send an email or a message about how you would like to help.
- Q: Where did you get these wonderful Thomas show images? A: The complete collection of these Promotional images are available for viewing and download on the archive section of the site. This is where we will put most of our unique finds that are worth sharing. There are still more things we have to upload but this was deemed the priority as we wanted to use these on the site and we figured people would want to see these the most.
- Q: What’s next? A: Everything. There are still so many toy ranges and media distributors that have been cataloged in spreadsheets and images, but need to be converted into HTML for site data. The biggest one, and the one I am most excited for, being ERTL’s 1/64th range. There are also many more lesser known topics we want to catalog. As for the blogs, there are quite a few topics lined up or already being written up. You should be really excited for these because they show the toys you may already own and love in a whole new light.
If there are any additional questions, don’t forget to email or message us and we’ll be happy to answer.
With that, I’ll leave this very text heavy blog with some fun pictures of the site as it went through development. Thanks for reading!
