Thomas & Friends series 5
season of television series
Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends is a children's television series about the engines and other characters working on the railways of the Island of Sodor, and is based on The Railway Series books written by Wilbert Awdry.
This article lists and details episodes from the fifth series of the show, which was first broadcast in 1998. This series was narrated by Michael Angelis for audiences in the United Kingdom, while Alec Baldwin narrated episodes for audiences in the United States.
In the United States, this season was first aired in 1999 on Fox Family. This was the first season of the series that was not aired on PBS Kids.
This was the last season produced by Gullane Entertainment's original name, The Britt Allcroft Company before its rename in 2000.
Production
Writing
The show's staff had decided since series 3 that most of the best stories of The Railway Series had been adapted, the rest involving too many new characters or closely resembling previous stories. With Series 5, the decision was made to write a full series of original, staff-written stories. One reason for this was producer Britt Allcroft's desire to create a theatrical Thomas the Tank Engine movie. She requested that director David Mitton should show off his modelling skills.
“Thomas & Friends series 5” enters the record as season of television series. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Thomas, Friends and series can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7795418. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1998, 1999 and 2000.
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This entry incorporates text from “Thomas & Friends series 5” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.