For more than a year, Yarmouth Yards has been hard to miss but hard to get close to: cranes, earthworks and fencing, an estimated $1 billion price tag, a $167 million borrowing plan, and tender awards for sewer pipe and pavement. Now, for the first time, the industrial park has something built for people to actually stand in front of.
A monumental sculpture called “Imagination Station,” by Ontario artist Briony Douglas, marks the spot. It shows oversized toy train cars, painted in primary colours, arranged in a circle on top of a steel post, next to a concrete sign reading “Yarmouth Yards Industrial Park,” set on a bed of fieldstone. It stands on the east side of Highbury Avenue, opposite Dennis Road and south of Ron McNeil Line, beside a small pond and a walking path. There’s no road in from Highbury there, just the path, so it’s a landmark people can walk up to rather than just drive past.
The City teased this back in June, in one line of a construction newsletter about Yarmouth Yards: “There’s also a new gateway sign going in just off Highbury Avenue, south of Ron McNeil Line. More on this one soon!” That newsletter never mentioned a sculpture. According to the London Free Press, which covered the event and called the piece a seven-metre artwork, the City unveiled the finished sign and sculpture together on Thursday, Aug. 13, with Douglas in attendance. LocVox checked the City’s own website and Facebook page again this week and found no release of its own yet.
This isn’t the first time St. Thomas has marked a big moment with oversized public art, or even with a train. Jumbo the elephant, killed by a train here in 1885, got his own 38-tonne statue in 1985, on the 100th anniversary of his death. In 2017, the city’s northern gateway got “Perseverance,” a 25-tonne steel silhouette of a steam train built by blacksmith Scott McKay. Imagination Station joins that small local family of landmark public art, this time at the edge of an industrial park.
Douglas describes the piece in her own words on the plaque bolted to the sculpture’s base. “Inspired by the timeless charm of a wooden toy train, this sculpture celebrates the memories, movement, and connections that railways have created across generations,” she writes. “The circular composition symbolizes an endless journey, reminding us that history continues to shape the present while inspiring the future.”
The dedication plaque at the base of Imagination Station. (Anthony Zruna / LocVox St. Thomas)
Douglas is a working Ontario artist known for large, playful sculpture and installation work. Her own website lists a 20-foot-long teddy bear made for Ronald McDonald House, a throne built out of tires, an 8-foot sneaker for Adidas, and a house-sized guitar for the Boots and Hearts festival among her past commissions. The City has since confirmed the piece was commissioned by the St. Thomas Economic Development Corporation as part of the Yarmouth Yards gateway signage project. What it cost is still not public.
The plaque sets a high bar for what the sculpture is supposed to do. Under the tagline “Grounded in heritage. Driven by purpose. Engineered for tomorrow,” it describes Yarmouth Yards as “a bridge between eras, where our proud manufacturing heritage and diverse industries meet the frontier of future technology and advanced innovation.” A toy train is one way of saying St. Thomas’s railway past still has a hand in its electric vehicle battery future. Online, the early reaction has been mixed. Some people like it; others have said it looks too childish.
The plaque also credits the mayor, the councillors who held seats across the 2023 to 2027 construction period, and city staff, though that stretch marks the industrial park’s construction, not its finish. The city’s financial planning still has years to run: the Dalewood Water Reclamation Facility, a separate wastewater plant on its own site and the largest item in the Yarmouth Yards financial plan, is not expected to be substantially finished until 2030.
For now, the sculpture is the finished, public-facing piece of a project that is otherwise still a construction site. Everything else, the borrowing, the debt payments, the wastewater plant still years from done, is in LocVox’s earlier coverage below.
Earlier coverage: St. Thomas Is Building Its Longest Rail Yard Yet, Right Next to the PowerCo Plant
Sources: St. Thomas Economic Development, “From the Beehive” E144, June 2026 · City of St. Thomas Council agenda, August 10, 2026 (Report TR-20-26, Yarmouth Yards Financial Plan) · St. Thomas Economic Development Corporation news release, August 13, 2026
By Anthony Zruna · About the LocVox Newsroom
Update - August 15, 2026, 5:35 a.m. ET: Added that the sculpture was commissioned by the St. Thomas Economic Development Corporation as part of the Yarmouth Yards gateway signage project, per the corporation’s own news release. The cost has still not been made public.
