My local PBS station showed Thomas the Tank Engine on almost infinite loop and so I came into the show in kind of the middle as a kid. I didn't know why Henry was so "bad" at his job and all of that, only that he was cranky and didn't seem to like everybody else that much.
Then this episode aired and my mother says I cried for two days over how Henry had been treated. (It didn't help that I was what was commonly called "a quiet child" and got picked on a lot for not wanting to play with other kids or just "being weird", something I think a lot of HN can relate to.) It wasn't long after that I stopped watching Thomas.
Years later, my kid picked up watching the show and learned how to record it on his TiVo. I made sure we watched that episode together.