Three Locomotives, Asleep

Behind the town, the railway. Grass grows in the rails now, but the overhead wires are still up, still taut, and three VL10 electric locomotives stand coupled together in green paint gone chalky with sun. I walked the platform edge with a notebook I did not open. Some scenes refuse summary while you are inside them.

The VL10 is the sound of my early memory of stations: a hum you feel in your teeth before you hear it. These three were silent, but silence in a machine that size is not absence. It is storage.

“Freight still runs through here,” a railwayman told me later, “when the copper works stir.” The locomotives are not dead, then. They are on call, like retired doctors in a small town.

I photographed them the way you photograph relatives at a reunion: frontally, honestly, without asking anyone to smile. The gorge did the lighting. It has had practice.