The Ultimate DIY-ers: If You Build It...

union uh is super adventure is a mucho foreign foreign ecological foreign ralph waldo emerson once quoted that nothing great can ever be achieved without enthusiasm i have a lot of enthusiasm this is northlands in flemington new jersey northlands is the world's largest model railroad well i guess you know everybody has a passion for something my thing was trains had trains around the christmas tree as a kid wherever i lived i'm planning track plans and then over 18 years i added five basements onto the house from that i got fairly good at making mountains and bridges and design work and we decided to give it to the world so we tore it all down bought this land built northlands any given day we run between 85 and 90 trains some of the details in northlands inside about 40 000 feet of track about 4 000 buildings over 400 bridges many of the mountains in here are three and a half stories high most things in here are scratch built underneath the entire superstructure there's enough lumber to build about 42 large houses takes a few hours to go through for the average person to see everything we went millions into debt to build this place everywhere i thought we were nuts the only one that believed that what i wanted to do was my wife and she was totally with me on this big time it's an artistic endeavor it's a gift to the world of what i can do and it makes a lot of people happy the town of region is dying i said if someone doesn't do something this community will be a dead community i have a paved road from interstate to region and what do i do to bring people down 30 miles then it dawned on me nobody is going to drive 30 miles for normal sculptures but they might drive for the world's largest i started the enchanted highway in 1989 i've been at it for 28 years and it takes me roughly about four to five years to do one sculpture the first year local ranchers taught me how to weld i put in eight hours a day to get one sculpture done i use old oil well tanks i cut them open and i flatten it out and that's 90 of my metal it's a passion project right now i started with that world's largest tin family the man is 45 feet tall the woman is 43 feet and the boy is 23 feet geese in flight has over 300 length of oil well pipe on over 15 miles of weld on it and is in the guinness book of records the world's largest scrap metal sculpture that's something i will continue on until i'm six feet under and then i hope it continues on after that i want people to see that this guy who didn't know how to weld didn't have an art class if he can create something like this i can do most anything you

Channel: Great Big Story

Views: 568,921

Keywords: great big story, gbs, great big reel, great big reel 104, handmade, hand built, model trains, architecture, medieval castle, soundscape ecologist, bernie krause, justo gallego, cathedral, DIY, if you build it, frontiers

Id: YzJeyZZLRbs

Length: 10min 43sec (643 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 15 2016