Caption: Just your neighbourhood yard job. Residents of 'The Ward' are used to rolling steel and friendly crews for neighbours. Trains have passed through, worked in, and been based out of St. Patrick's Ward since the Guelph Junction Railway laid track in 1888, and with OSR moving out last week, GEXR has moved in. GEXR 583 (ordered 1400) has arrived in Guelph after switching out cars at Arkell and is seen heading around the south leg of the "Downtown wye" (Alice Street wye to some crews) to runaround a cut of cars on the main destined for Lower Yard 2, and the CN interchange tomorrow on GEXR 582 (ordered 0800). Up until 1976 or so, this area was the base of operations for the CP Guelph yard switcher. An 0-6-0 switcher during the steam days, and often an MLW S-3 in later years, were based out of the Alice Street engine shed located roughly where the large bush is seen beyond the 2117 above. After demolition, the yard switcher was based out of a former team track located in the yard downtown.

St. Patrick's Ward has always been host to industry and small businesses along with it's residential sector. The large Italian immigrant community created shops providing anything people could need right in their own back yard; butcher shops and grocers, barber shops, mechanics garages, schools, and Sacred Heart Church. Numerous industries built factories in the area around 1900 as a number of their workers would come from the Ward. Some of these included Harding Yarns, Taylor-Forbes Manufacturing Co, (later W.C. Woods), IMICO; the International Malleable Iron Co. (note stock cars behind in siding - today's GJR Lower Yard), and the famed Biltmore Hats. To the right, out of frame beside 2117 is the former Northern (later Dominion) Rubber Company building, (see this link for view of tracks - 1948) now in the midst of condo redevelopment like much of the former industrial neighbourhood.