 and welcome to my proto-freelance railroad the Allagash set in North Central Maine in the spring of 1977. We're at a location on the Allagash called New Portland, Maine. And eventually this will be home to a major customer for the Allagash Railway and that's the St. Regis pulp and paper mill. We're looking at the space where this paper mill will be built and over the next couple of months I'll be very busy working on this project. Promises to be a real challenge and very interesting too. As you know paper mills are gigantic industrial complexes and they require a lot of space to model. That presents a challenge so that also something that makes this project a little bit unusual is we will be creating this industrial giant paper mill in a very very small space. We're looking at about a two and a half foot wide by six foot long area to build and essentially we've got a picture window which we cut into this wall behind here houses to house the furnace and other utilities for the house and water system in a small dispatching office. We've created a little bit of a space you can do something with. So the question is how do you build a gigantic paper mill in such a small space? So what we're going to do is use a high-resolution photo backdrop of a real paper mill and put that in the space to give us a backdrop against which we'll set some 3D elements and create a nice realistic paper mill setting. Of course we won't be able to model the quantity of traffic that a typical paper mill would have but we'll be able to simulate very closely some of the operations of a mill. Okay welcome back to New Portland and let's take a look at the progress we've made so far since we first began the project. Just to review some of the things we've done we've attached a eight foot long piece of polystyrene. It goes from here to here, it codes in this entire corner here. Upon that we've attached the high-resolution photo backdrop of the actual mill and we've gone ahead and cut out this doorway here on the loading shed. We've actually cut out the polystyrene and the photo backdrop this will allow us to spot box cars for pulp loading inside the shed which is actually two-dimensional. Finish off the scene and create a nice shadow box look. We took some flat gray latex paint to match as best we could to the photo backdrop and painted the gap here and the ceiling. The next step was to paint the fair plywood with a nice earth-brown flat latex paint to give everything a uniform appearance. With the exception of these areas that are white which will represent the employee parking lot over in this area here and a road that will access the back part of the mill behind with eventually the widget pile here and then an access road off the layout for traffic coming into the employee parking lot. We painted those areas white to set those off. The next step was to work on a couple of crossings and we did that here. We've got four crossings, one, two, three, and four. These are all wood plank crossing so we used some scale lumber to attach the wood plank into the track here with some Cypox. And then out here we've got an asphalt cross here so we actually took some boat 70 scrap rail and attached that with Cypox. The next step obviously is to to build this road system before we can start doing other ground cover dirt ballast and things like that. We've got a paint outline of it. We're going to use a material called lightweight spackling compound from Ace. It's great stuff and I'll show you in a couple minutes how we're going to tint that and color it and spread it onto the road surface. The first thing we need to do is to create a guide for spreading that asphalt material. What I like to use is just ordinary Midwest cork, just some scrap pieces of it. Use the square side facing in towards the road here and this will give us a nice outline. We'll take some just some simple small brads or nails and again this does not have to be perfect or anything. Really doesn't matter a whole lot. Attach those with a couple of nails, one up here as well, and then to the other side as well. We're going to do this a little bit at a time. We don't need to do entire things. We can do a small section at a time or you could set up the entire road with light or whatever your preference is. That's critical. That's it. So we've got the road marked off with two pieces of cork. What we're going to do is take a putty knife and this material and then screed it right into the surface and then we'll let that dry for a couple of days, sand it, and then eventually we're going to blend this entire scene. We'll have an asphalt road, parking lot, and then lots and lots of ground cover that to cover in the next segment.