00:00 STEVE: I'm Steven Duncan, I'm an urban explorer
and urban historian, that means I run round the unseen layers of a city and expose parts
that most people don't see.
00:10 STEVE: With Fallout 4 being released I wanted
to get under the skin of the Massachusetts we had forgotten about, to find these places
lost in time that tell their own story, and that might have inspired the setting of the
game.
00:25 STEVE: Back to the Civil War this town became
one of the real centres of American industry.
The population of workers was exploding and so they had to take water from the Watuppa
lake and send it into town.
00:40 STEVE: The nice thing about a water pumping
plant is that all the exciting stuff happens underground.
00:50 STEVE: Place like this are just perfectly
preserved time capsules.
This is what I was hoping to find, one of the original steam pumps from 1874.
This is one of the newest electric motors that would have been installed somewhere around
World War II.
Made in the USA, bad when we actually made stuff around here.
01:18 STEVE: Wow, that's incredible.
I've never seen a steam engine this size actually in the States.
01:43 STEVE: They first set up two massive steam
pumps, in the 20th Century those were supplanted with diesel pumps, then eventually with electric
pumps, right here in this massive 19th century building.
I love this stuff.
02:14 STEVE: I came here to the Strathmore Paper
Mill, when I go into a place like this where I have it essentially to myself the risks
I take are my own.
Beautiful huge space.
Let's see if we can go downstairs and find out what this looks like underneath.
02:33 STEVE: What I love doing in a place like this
is piecing it together.
Figuring out the whole story from the bits that are left.
02:42 STEVE: Love these boilers.
You have to admire it right there.
Still works pretty well too.
Well maybe not perfect.
03:00 STEVE: We're well below the level of the canal
at this point, and a little bit of it's leaking in.
03:09 STEVE: You can see the drill marks where they
drill down to plant the dynamite to blast out the space.
There's a lot of stories here, and the last story is us exploring it, until the next story
comes along.
03:34 STEVE: I think part of the reason the Fallout
series has been so popular is the same reason that I love exploring the urban environment,
I enjoy places where I can see how history has been written on the landscape . I do think
exploring places like the pumping station and or the Strathmore Mill is like engaging
in dialogue with the past.
Learning from books is great but it's boring.
END