Thomas and the Magic Railroad

Lily, an eleven-year-old girl, boards the wrong train and is carried through a swirl of golden dust to a magical island where the trains talk. There she meets Thomas, the blue locomotive, along with Mr. Conductor, whose supply of the magic gold dust that lets him move between Shining Time and the island has nearly run out. Finding more of it means enlisting Mr. Conductor's lazy cousin, Lily's gloomy grandfather, and a secret engine, while the diesel locomotives press their attacks and the island faces a threat that could destroy it.

The film was directed, written and produced by Britt Allcroft, marking her feature debut after her work behind the Thomas the Tank Engine television series she had adapted from the Reverend W. Awdry's stories. Alec Baldwin plays Mr. Conductor, Peter Fonda appears as Grandpa Burnett Stone and Mara Wilson as Lily, with Neil Crone voicing several of the diesel characters. The credited cast runs to twenty-three performers and the crew to forty.

Released in July 2000, the film cost about nineteen million dollars and took roughly twenty million worldwide, a return that left little margin. Audiences have not embraced it since: on IMDb it holds a rating of 4.3 from some five thousand two hundred votes, and on TMDB a rating of 5.3 from about one hundred votes, placing it among the less favoured adaptations of the railway stories.