DALLAS (AP) – When Jane Sanders decided it was time to move from her Preston Hollow home, she had a locomotive-sized problem: what to do with her late husband’s model train display.
With an estimated value of more than $1 million, the G scale model layout spans more than 2,000 square feet and has 12 precision trains that run simultaneously. It’s remarkable not only for its size but also its exquisite detail and originality.
The Dallas Morning News (http://bit.ly/2k1z3vB ) reports Stephen Sanders started working on the display when the couple lived in Corsicana several years ago. As they were constructing their Dallas home, he added a new wing to the second floor to house his passion. Then he kept expanding it. He was the ultimate collector.
“Every time you look at it, you’ll see something different,” Jane Sanders said. “He was always the best at everything ... this was his legacy.”
Now, nearly four years after her husband’s death at age 68, she has decided to donate his model train layout, his huge collection of rolling stock in storage and other railroad memorabilia to the Museum of the American Railroad in Frisco.
Museum officials couldn’t say no.
“We were blown away by this,” railroad museum CEO Bob LaPrelle said of the mammoth collection. “I had no idea it existed.”
The collection’s move to Frisco will be on a much smaller scale than the one that brought the museum’s life-size collection north from Fair Park several years ago. But it will be just as pain-staking and require almost as much planning.
The nonprofit plans to turn Sanders’ collection into a visitor attraction. It will house the collection at the city-owned Frisco Discovery Center, which already generates traffic with the Black Box Theater, Sci-Tech Discovery Center and the National Videogame Museum.
“This puts our big collection in context and shows it actually working and tying communities together,” LaPrelle said. “It really allows us to create a whole new destination for visitors, a sort of destination within the museum.”
