I'd never seen that video. Pretty funny now seeing the mistakes made. He blames someone for recommending soldering jumpers between sections, but look in the background... clearly the person soldering knows nothing about soldering.... you can see at least 30 seconds of the iron applied to the rail... This is what happens when you know nothing about soldering, heat on plastic, and employ someone who knows even less than you do. No wonder the track was damaged. But he blames some guy that told him it was a good idea... the guy should have said "provided you know something about soldering"..
Also, I believe dual rail benders were available then, rather than pull each rail from the ties. Again whoever was coaching him (if there was a person) was not much help.
Another thing that was weird, is that he used what we call "wire nuts" to connect the power wires, not really suited for an outdoor environment. Should have been a single jumper soldered AFTER the track was in place, not soldered to each section requiring another joint.
Funny thing that he underestimated the height of the container cars and had to raise the tunnel....
I see he did find the issue with the Aristo Wide Radius switches as I did (he calls them #4 which is the correct frog number).
There's easier ways to modify the turnout frog, funny, instead of sanding down the frog top and scratching up the rails, you can use a router with a 1/2" or 3/4" flat bottom cutter, and make it level with the bottom of the router, do that and you only cut down what is higher than the rails, i.e. the frog.
Deepening the frog was done with several hack saw blades ganged together the width of the flangeway.
To be fair, in those years we were all learning how to fix Aristo switches.
Notice at 21:31 he indicates the layout is on under 1 acre of land, not 4... the entire property is 4 acres, the layout is less than 1 acre. We had some argument about that, but the overhead maps and finally Dennis himself confirms the actual layout size.
Funny, when he talks about the lack of quality locos, and he said eventually they became available, and most of his stuff is brass or die cast locos, it's a set of plastic USA Trains F3's or NW2 or S4 switchers.
The question I always had about why he was half battery was answered, he "heard" that track power had issues with polarity, and he could not control his trains independently. Unbelievable that he did not research track powered remote control, like DCC, with all the infinite funds he had, but clearly he did not do much research on his options himself and did not surround himself with experts, most of the work on the layout was clearly unskilled labor.
He did figure out to go pneumatic switch motors, but how he controlled them was a mess.
All the trains are squished sideways in the video up to 43 minutes, notice how short the cars are. Then it magically shifts to better quality and a proper aspect ratio. I mention this because spotting the manufacture of the trains in the beginning is a bit tougher, but once you see the Aristo heavyweights you can then see that all the trains are squished.
93 cars on one train. After he cut out the sections of rail they damaged by incompetent soldering, that shows he finally got it running nicely. When I visited at the convention in Phoenix, the track was dead straight and beautiful. He still complained that the experts steered him wrong, but it was people who knew nothing about soldering that he chose. Like I mentioned in previous posts, you could not tell him anything about trains, he knew it all, but when things went wrong he blamed others.
Funny he went to a large expense to change to lithium batteries because they are "smaller, better, faster", but none of his locos were small and battery size should not have been an issue.
At around 56:11 you see him with an AirWire controller in one hand, and the walkie talkie he used to call the guy at the house to activate turnouts.
All in all, a beautiful layout, that eventually got to smooth operation, but never was modernized to reliable multi train control or remote control of turnouts, which was too bad. Now it's gone but it and Dennis will be remembered.
Another video to watch is Dan from Eaglewings, also in arizona... his display layout has a lot of bridges...
At about 16:40 dennis comes on the video, and you can see the staging track extensions in the garage that Dennis used to set up long trains.
at 57:25 you can see Dan's display layout, bet you cannot count how many bridges there are!
Finally a video that shows the massive amount of rolling stock Dennis amassed (he owned restaurants, which is where the bakers cooling racks come from):
Anyway it was an interesting time, basically a lot of people learning how to overcome issues in larger layouts.
Greg