Station 8.4.33
when nesting a compo with timeline within a timeline, the child timeline won't play manually if the child timeline was created after adding the child compo to the parent timeline. Child compo timeline must be added before adding child compo to parent timeline.
Fix is to delete child compo from parent timeline and add it again. The fix is easy enough, if you know about it, but took me ages to figure out why this wasn't playing.