Walking the railroad in Ontario …….

Now, if you want a series of images of rural North America, these from Karen Mahoney do the trick.

They bring back countless films of small towns, and hamlets which history has pretty much passed over and the railroad is the one reminder along with the radio station that there is a bigger world out there.

But that is a tad unfair on Guelph which is where these railroad tracks are situated.

My Wikipedia tells me that Guelph has "a population 131,794), is a city in Southwestern Ontario, Canada. 

Known as 'The Royal City', Guelph is roughly 28 km east of Kitchener and 100 km west of Downtown Toronto, at the intersection of Highway 6, Highway 7 and Wellington County Road 124. 

It is the seat of Wellington County, but is politically independent of it. The city is built on the traditional territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation.

Guelph began as a settlement in the 1820s, established by Scotsman John Galt, who was in Upper Canada as the first Superintendent of the Canada Company. He based the headquarters, and his home, in the community. 

The area – much of which became Wellington County – had been part of the Halton Block, a Crown Reserve for the Six Nations Iroquois. Galt would later be considered as the founder of Guelph.

For many years, Guelph ranked at or near the bottom of Canada's crime severity list. 

However, the 2017 Crime Severity Index showed a 15% increase from 2016. Guelph has been noted as having one of the lowest unemployment rates in the country throughout the Great Recession. In late 2018, the Guelph Eramosa and Puslinch entity had an unemployment rate of 2.3 per cent, which decreased to 1.9 percent by January 2019, the lowest of all Canadian cities. 

The national unemployment rate at the time was 5.8 percent. Much of this achievement was due to the great number of manufacturing facilities, including Linamar”.*

And it is birthplace of  John McCrae who was author of In Flanders Fields.

So, the images are perhaps not quite what I thought, but nevertheless I do like them, leaving me just to quote Karen who commented, “A quick trip to Guelph to see my mum and my sister. 

I told Laura to come check out the tracks with me, she said you shouldn't play on them, I said we did all the time when I was young, even my mum played on them when she was young. 

The men who rode the rails were always invited into my great grandmother's for a drink and some food. My sister lives in the same house that we grew up in, so when I go home, I really go home. Freight cars still use the line”.

But the images of  "men who rode the rails", still conjures up memories of those films and for me sitting here in Manchester, thousands of miles away that will do.

Location; Guelph, Ontario

Pictures, railroad tracks, Guelph, 2021, from the collection of Karen Mahoney

* Guelph, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guelph