The original Thomas series seemed like it would be pretty ghastly a thing for a child to watch anyways. Rolling, dead eyes and stories about motherfuckers getting buried alive to punish them.
I still like Clifford The Big Red Dog. I don't watch much of it these days, but I have feelings for it.
I love anthropomorphism, but for some reason I haven't been able to connect with the inanimate object version of it as in trains or robots and it has to represent a real animal.