We’d taken a railroad job that required measurements every six hours, and with a small crew, that meant doubles straight through. Long nights, short breaks, and the kind of tired that settles deep in your shoulders. It was an auger bore job — the sort where the work is slow, steady, and unforgiving, as the crew hand-tunneled through dense ground. All you can do is keep the line, keep the pace, and wait for the next cycle.
Between shots, the world would go quiet.
I’d sit by the equipment, listening to old radio shows crackle through the speakers — the kind of stories my grandparents might’ve heard live. The voice of some long-forgotten broadcaster mixed with the hum of generators and the occasional clatter from the bore pit. Every so often, an RTD train would glide past, lit up like a moving constellation against the dark. I started photographing them just to stay awake at first, but the more I watched, the more I recognized the beauty in the rhythm: steel on steel, light on rails, motion cutting through stillness.
Hours passed that way — working, measuring, resetting, waiting. Watching aircraft climb out of Denver International Airport to the north. Catching the glow of their engines tracing arcs across the sky. The whole scene felt strangely peaceful for a job site, like the world had slowed down just long enough for me to notice it.
Photography kept me present. It gave those empty hours a purpose, a frame, a way to remember the quiet that settles over industrial work at night.
Not every adventure happens in some far-off place.
Sometimes it happens in a dirt lot — on the dark side of a railroad, beside a bore pit, with a camera in hand and a train passing by every so often.
