The New St. Thomas Sculpture Is a 25-Foot Toy Train

The newest St. Thomas sculpture is a wooden toy train, and it stands 25 feet tall — nowhere near a swing set or a sandbox. It's called Imagination Station, it was assembled and unveiled at a ceremony on the afternoon of Thursday, Aug. 13, and it now sits at the corner of Dennis Road and Highbury Avenue on the eastern edge of the city.

The artist is Briony Douglas, who grew up in Woodstock, another southwestern Ontario city, and moved to Toronto at 16 to chase the work. She has made oversized objects for Adidas, for the Red Bull Formula 1 team and for music festivals across the continent. This one is different in a way that matters to her: according to 94.1 St.ThomasToday, it's her first permanent public art commission. Everything before it came down after a weekend or a season.

The address is the part outsiders will skim past. This is not a leafy park with benches and a splash pad. Imagination Station marks the gateway to Yarmouth Yards, the roughly 1,500-acre industrial park where PowerCo, backed by Volkswagen, is building a $7-billion electric-vehicle battery plant. Thousands of construction crews, truck drivers and eventually factory staff will drive past a giant toy on their way to the biggest industrial build in the province.

Why This St. Thomas Sculpture Sits by a Highway

Gateway pieces do a specific job. They tell drivers they've arrived somewhere, and they tell investors the place has money and confidence to spend on something that isn't asphalt. Choosing a toy train instead of a steel abstract is the interesting call here — it points backward at the rail yards that built St. Thomas and forward at the plant rising behind it, without a single explanatory plaque.

The city already knows what a landmark object can do. Jumbo the elephant, killed by a train in St. Thomas in 1885, has anchored the western entrance in statue form since the mid-1980s and still pulls travellers off the highway for a photo. Imagination Station now bookends the other side of town. One remembers a circus animal; the other stands where the next 40 years of paycheques will come from.

The Artist Who Left Home at 16

Douglas works as a visual artist, photographer, director and illustrator, and her signature move is scale — take a thing everyone recognizes, blow it up until it stops being ordinary, and let people react. Her explanation of the method is refreshingly free of art-speak.

My work is rooted in the idea that familiar objects carry extraordinary emotional weight.

From an Adidas Sneaker to a House-Sized Guitar

Her back catalogue reads like a dare. A 20-foot teddy bear for Ronald McDonald House. A throne built from tires. An eight-foot sneaker for Adidas. A guitar the size of a house for the Boots and Hearts festival. A piece for the Red Bull F1 team made entirely from recycled material. Brand work and charity work, mostly built fast, photographed hard and dismantled soon after.

Her First Work Built to Stay Outside

A permanent outdoor commission is a different engineering problem. It has to survive Ontario winters, road salt, wind loading off open farmland and the attention of anyone who wants to climb it. That's why the leap from festival build to civic landmark is a real career marker, not just a bigger invoice — the piece has to still look right in 2046.

What's Rising on the Other Side of the Fence

The scale next door is hard to picture. PowerCo's St. Thomas gigafactory is planned around six production blocks with a potential output of up to 90 gigawatt hours — enough cells for roughly a million EVs a year — and is expected to create up to 3,000 jobs, with initial production targeted for 2027. It's on track to be Canada's largest EV battery plant. Put plainly: a $7-billion facility got a wooden toy as its front door.

How to See It, and What Lands Next

You don't need a ticket or a parking pass. A few practical notes if you're making the drive from London, Aylmer or Port Stanley:

• It's at Dennis Road and Highbury Avenue, on the city's eastern industrial edge — free, outdoors, visible from the road.
• Early morning and late evening are the good light; the piece reads best against open sky.
• Downtown St. Thomas is about ten minutes west if you want to make an afternoon of it.

There's more coming. Vancouver-based artist Ola Volo is due in downtown St. Thomas in September 2026 to paint a large mural at Hepburn Park, which suggests the toy train wasn't a one-off gesture. Watch for whether the city publishes what these commissions cost and how future artists get picked — that's the detail that decides whether this becomes a public art program or stays a single good photo opportunity.