The Eight Oh Five to Manchester

The Eight Oh Five to Manchester (Printed as 8:05 - Manchester in promotional material) was a combined media project started by George Hudson and Howard Taft of the Railway Kings in 2014. The project was a spin-off from the main band in the down periods when Shaftesbury was working as a producer for other bands. Despite a strong fanbase from both Creosote and new Railway Kings material and a good premise, the project has been widely panned by critics for a variety of reasons.

While initially planned to start as a podcast, decisions on the part of Hudson and Taft blew the project out of proportion and the progression of expansion of such a project was accelerated wildly. While the first two weeks went well and the 2 hour podcast was well received talking about topics from beer to wildlife, by the third week a series of spin-offs were announced as well as a line of promotional media including a run of t-shirts featuring 'catchphrases' from the podcast. While these were only on sale for a week and the podcast carried on as just a podcast for a further 9 months, much of the damage was already done and any faults in the program were jumped upon by critics. Leaks by a member of staff revealed that there had also been plans for tie in albums as well as a web-series.

The incident had quite a bit impact on public perception of the Creosote - Railway Kings feud. While it is considered that the feud had died a death by 2014, it lead many to look back upon the near perfect public image the Railway Kings and especially Hudson and Taft had garnered compared to their former bandmate. The near immediate capitalization on small success and baffling choices with merchandise showed the duo as being just as fallible as their obese ex-colleague.

Speaking in an interview in 2018, Hudson attempted to explain the decision. "Well we basically had about 3 month period to ourselves. Shaftesbury was off working with Kaiser Chiefs in the first half of the year for Education, Education, Education & War, and then moved almost straight on to working with Noel Gallagher for Chasing Yesterday, so we had almost the entirety of 2014 off from the Railway Kings and only minimal obligations through the other 9 months of the year. Problem is, i'd just been up to Scotland for some meetings and spent a few days visiting some distilleries and ended up with a very well stocked drinks cabinet. It spiralled from there into a couple of months of stupor and we made some bad decisions. I think we just got so caught up in it and we were so boozed we didn't even notice that this was gonna go really bad. I will put some blame on our management for letting some of this stuff go through though. We're not Jeremiah, we don't threaten or stomp our feet, and they could've come up with reasons to delay obviously damaging decisions to our brand. I'm just glad that most people understood that we're human, we're fallible and we got this one wrong."

When asked for comment by The Guardian, the Railway Kings management Midland Railway Management, refused. It closed in 2016 amid controversy of mis-management of it's clients, with many rumours circulating that it might've involved Hudson/Tafts former bandmate Jeremiah Creosote. This has been hotly denied by the CEO of MRM and even Howard Taft, who was quoted as saying "I think it's a load of bollocks that Jeremiah purposefully fucked our management company up to ruin our podcast and land us in hot water. Fact is, we made a mistake there, we got cocky, and from what I remember we got mighty pissed up too. As much as we try not to, even we rockstars make mistakes."