From Mabalacat to the Washington DC Metro: The Kapampangan Engineer Who Wrote a Novel
ONE KAPAMPANGAN | Feature
There is a particular kind of Kapampangan story that does not begin with ambition. It begins with rain.
Engr. Ariel Delos-Reyes was born in San Francisco, Mabalacat, in a Pampanga that no longer quite exists — the one before subdivisions and interchanges, when fruit trees stood in nearly every yard and acacia trees lined the highways like old guardians. Farmers and carabaos still walked the inner streets. Life, as he puts it, moved at a gentler pace.
"The world felt warmer then," he writes, "quieter somehow, as if people had more time for each other."
Nearly five decades and five countries later, that boy is an engineer living in Richmond, Virginia, who has spent his career keeping trains from colliding — in Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, England, and the United States — and who has now, unexpectedly, published a novel.
The boy who wanted to build things with his hands
Delos-Reyes told GMA News Online that his path began at fourteen, tinkering with broken radios and televisions. It was never about the title.
"I always wanted to become an engineer," he says, "but not the kind who stayed behind desks buried in paperwork. I wanted to solve technical problems with my own hands and mind. To me, that was the soul of engineering."
He graduated from Holy Angel University, Electrical Engineering, Batch '95, and took his first job at a power company in Floridablanca, Pampanga. Then, like so many of his generation, opportunity called him outward — first Malaysia, then Saudi Arabia, then, in 1999, England.
Of Saudi Arabia he is careful and generous: a land of deep hospitality and tradition beneath the heat, where freedom nonetheless felt distant. "I remain grateful for the experience," he says, "and I hope the world continues to discover the beauty hidden within that ancient place."
But it was England that marked him.
Three in the morning, and the tracks looked silver
He worked railway signalling — the systems that tell a train where every other train is, the difference between an ordinary evening commute and a headline. He started at the bottom, repairing whatever broke. The work was mostly at night, often in the middle of forests or on the edges of old towns that looked frozen in time.
What he remembers most is the silence.
"At three in the morning, the tracks looked silver beneath the floodlights, and the cold had a way of slipping through gloves no matter how expensive they were. It was bitter cold, but good for the spirit nonetheless. There was purpose in the work. You knew that somewhere, hundreds — perhaps thousands — of commuters would pass safely over the systems you helped build, repair, and maintain."
His first day, he admits, was chaotic and intimidating, and he was not sure he belonged. What changed was the men beside him. "Hard work strips away pretension," he says, "and leaves only character behind."
Carrying the machinery of nations
The United States came next, and with it a different order of responsibility. He served as an engineer for signal construction for a Class I railroad — an environment, he notes, where mistakes are measured not in money but in human lives. He later became Superintendent for the Washington DC Metro system, and eventually moved into consulting for an engineering firm based in Chicago.
Sometimes, standing on a platform in the American capital, the weight of it would land on him: the passengers moving through those tunnels were politicians, diplomats, military officials, civil servants — people whose quiet decisions shaped the direction of the world.
"There was something humbling," he says, "about knowing that the systems we maintained carried not just commuters, but the machinery of nations."
For a boy from Mabalacat who once flew kites in open fields, it is not a small distance travelled.
The years he does not skip over
What makes his story worth telling is that he refuses to end it there.
America also brought what he calls the darkest chapter of his life. A sudden divorce broke something in him he could not name at the time. Depression followed, and he carried it silently for years without fully understanding what was happening.
It was in that darkness that he started to write.
"At first the words were heavy, angry, and filled with pain," he says. "But over time, as healing slowly arrived, the writing changed. It became calmer, wiser perhaps, and more truthful. Eventually the words began sounding like me again."
And then came Georgie — a small dog with an enormous effect. "Sometimes I ask myself who truly saved whom," he says, "and the answer is always the same: Georgie saved me."
Today he speaks of his daughter Forest, his son Dale, his grandson Elias — "one of the brightest lights of my life" — and his fiancée Annola, whose laughter, he says, has softened many difficult days.
He also speaks, with unusual tenderness, of family still in the Philippines: a father who believed in discipline and carrying oneself properly; a mother whose gentleness he misses every single day; a grandmother whose cooking and stories he cannot fully explain the loss of; and a brother he has argued with more times than he can count and admired all his life.
"Some bonds between brothers are like that," he writes. "Rough around the edges, stubborn, loud at times, but rooted in something deeper than pride."
The Hidden Alignment
His debut novel, The Hidden Alignment: A British Countryside Mystery, is set in the Hampshire countryside he came to love.
It follows Nigel Pembroke, a meticulous London accountant and railway enthusiast, who arrives in the village of Liphook wanting nothing more than quiet and history. What he finds instead is a pattern. Exploring old railway routes, forests, and forgotten survey lines, Nigel is drawn into the mystery of Edward Harrow, a vanished Victorian surveyor whose strange triangulation markers appear scattered across the landscape.
With Francine Heath, a local historian who reads the land the way others read text, Nigel begins to suspect that the railways, forests, ancient paths and villages are not separate things at all, but parts of a much older system — something quietly waiting beneath the surface of rural England.
Blending railway history, English folklore, subtle supernatural tension and reflections on memory and human nature, the novel is as much about belonging as it is about mystery. Which, given the life of the man who wrote it, is not a coincidence.
What he wants Kapampangans to know
We asked him for the one thing he would say to fellow Kapampangans, wherever in the world they are reading this from.
"Our beginnings do not limit our destinations. Whether in engineering, the arts, business, or any other field, we should never be afraid to pursue interests and passions that may seem unrelated to our careers. Sometimes the most meaningful journeys begin in unexpected places."
Somewhere inside the engineer, he says, the boy from Pampanga is still there — listening to the rain, dreaming quietly about the future, never fully realising how far the tracks of life would eventually carry him.
Mabalacat is still in him. That is the whole point.
About the author
Engr. Ariel Delos-Reyes is an electrical engineer, railway signalling specialist and novelist. Originally from San Francisco, Mabalacat, Pampanga, he graduated from Holy Angel University (Electrical Engineering, Batch '95) and has worked across Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, the United Kingdom and the United States, including as Superintendent for the Washington DC Metro system. He is the author of The Hidden Alignment: A British Countryside Mystery and currently lives in Richmond, Virginia.
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