A rather last minute assignment last night that called me for me to descend into the bowels of the SMRT train system to document them replacing old rails.

A very interesting process tempered only by the fact that we could only make our way down after train services had stopped and the locos with the workers had arrived and come to a full stop at 0100hrs.

Not that I am complaining, as I am not a fan of being in a tunnel with nowhere to run and moving trains.

In a nutshell, each team has to replace an 18 meter train rail in their window of operations each night (about 0100-0430hrs). It doesn't sound like much, but each rail has to be cut off, replaced, re-welded with molten metal, smoothened out with major grinding and clamped before the team can call it a night.

It may have been a late night shoot for me, but I have nothing but respect for these guys that do this tough job in a poorly circulated tunnel every night.