 Let's almost hear reporting not from the NMRA convention in Hartford but from a from the Houstonic Railway of Craig Bisguyer. That's right. Okay so how are you doing Craig? I'm doing great thanks we've had a really great week at the convention and so a lot of really neat clinics made a lot of good operating sessions and all and now we're here and I'm really excited to have you guys. Well we're excited to see your railway we've heard a lot about it so how about we get to it and you tell us what what you got here. Sounds great I'd love to. We're here at Wilson Point would you give us a little insight on what's here? Basically what you're looking at here is the beginning of the railroad on the south end at the Long Island Sound. This is the end of the railroad and in 1892 the Housatonic was in very serious competition with the New Haven railroad. What was happening is that at that time the New Haven had all of their routes into New York City pretty much choking everything off and all the rest of the railroads in Connecticut were looking for ways to try and get their goods and their passengers to New York City but it was very difficult because otherwise you had to go all the way up to Beacon New York over the bridge there and then down say on the Erie or something along those lines. What the Housatonic did is they took over a smaller railroad called the Danbury and Norwalk which ran obviously between Danbury and Norwalk Absolutely and what they did is instead of going on their original main line which ran from Pittsfield, Massachusetts through Danbury and then to Bridgeport, Connecticut now they had direct access to a much closer port to New York City and they started using this as their main line and what they did was they ran all of their southbound traffic that was going that way down here to Wilson Point where they built this very large rail marine terminal and a lot of traffic would go by car float which we see one of right here cars would be loaded on here and go to locations like New York City, Brooklyn, Long Island and New Jersey and also there were ferries that would come up and dock up here next to the pier and they would be loaded and unloaded depending on what was going on there were bulk stuff that came up there were coal that came in lumber and such so there was a lot of traffic that ran through here and what happened was sorry what happened was in 1892 the Housatonic was fighting like I said fighting with the New Haven and they eventually were taken over by the New Haven in July of 1892 and that was when this whole area was basically completely shut down okay well actually you're modeling this here I'm looking at this amazing wharf you get how much wood have you got in there well it's hard to say basically it's all basswood which was all cut from very large chunks of it on my table saw we came and we made all the strip wood the dowels that make up the pilings there's 2,400 of them mostly put in by my friend David Ramos it took about five months to build everything that you see here from the pilings to the caps that go on top of them the pier is actually made from eighth inch plywood that's strong underneath it for strength and then decked with uh sorry uh basswood strips um boy this is just amazing you know how about the water how did you how did you do that and again tell us what kind of problems you ran into and what would you do well you had to do it over again we certainly did have some issues with it what we did when we first did this is we had all the pilings put in and we had painted the deck a nice blue color in order to try to make it look like deep water here and uh we had a weekend where a number of my operators came by and we had a big party to actually pour all the water and through some unfortunate communication the envirotex which is the epoxy that a lot of us use in order to represent water uh was mixed much too vigorously and ended up coming out very much like meringue so it was this big foamy mess and uh we were all panicking and we kept we tried to pour it out and spread it out and hoping everything would be okay and it just looked like a wedding cake it was and we were sure it was just going to be a complete disaster uh until one of my guys remembered hey wait a minute are we supposed to go with a a propane torch over the stuff in order to get any bubbles to release so i ran into the back and i got my propane torch out that i used for plumbing work and started it up and we weaved it across the foam and all of a sudden it just collapsed and went right down clear again which was great and there was only a couple spots on here where it didn't work out very well there was a couple places down in the corner there where it's a little cloudy where we didn't quite get to it in time but other than that it ended up working out pretty well the other big problem that happened is that once the envirotex had dried uh it was this very large expanse and it was clear as a bell flat and you could see the reflection of all the lights and that was just you know that just couldn't work yeah we couldn't work that so we ended up coming back with it and uh we used a combination of a gloss medium gel and gloss medium liquor that we mixed together and then stippled on with paint brushes in order to get the wavy texture in the water and i'm very happy with the way that that came out finally well it looks great from from my vantage anyway and we're we're looking here and it's still amazed at the size of this thing and it's real great it's about 14 feet long and about three feet wide at its widest point amazing craig this has been a real treat you know thank you very much for having us and who's the tonic railway is just great well thank you it's really very kind of you to say so it's been great having you guys here and on behalf of myself and my construction crew of guys who have put endless hours of work into this thank you very much