Tristan & Friends

Tristan & Friends is a stop-motion (later CGI) series produced by HiT Entertainment. Because both HiT Entertainment and NBC co-owned Kidville when the channel was launched, it aired a variety of shows from both their archive libraries on Kidville, including reruns of Tristan & Friends.

Plot
The show revolves around The Island Of Soto, a fictional British island with lots of railway lines, including the main one, the South Eastern Railway, where Tristan The Steam Locomotive, the #1 locomotive, and his best friends Perry, John, Grayson, Harold, Edmond, Elodie, and Tommy work. They work under the guardianship of Sir Triman Simp. Other characters include Rude Ron, Tristan's rival, Bob the Bus, Hank the Helicopter, and others.

In earlier seasons, all the vehicles were scale models and the humans and animals were wooden figurines. In season 12, the engines' faces were rendered in CGI, as well as the humans and animals. Starting with the 2004 feature film Hero Of The Tracks, the entire show is rendered in CGI. The stories are told via a narrator (Mick Jagger in seasons 1-4, Tim Robbins in seasons 5-6, and Bruce Carnwarth in seasons 7-15).