Layout Home

I started coming out to Argyle about 10 years ago to work and operate on my friend Shane's layout. He had moved the Roanoke T&P section house on to about 2 acres of pasture in 2000 and was building a large, double decked T&P / MKT themed layout in it. This was a regular place for our informal Thursday Night Jazz and Pie Society round robin group to meet. The section house was built in in 1895.

My wife and I spent most of the summer of 2013 looking for a new house on a piece of land. We wanted something between Denton, TX and McKinney, TX. Ideally, I was looking for a place with a metal shop building that I could use as a layout room. I mentioned in passing to Shane that we might be neighbors soon, and he told me he had put his house in town and the land with the section house up for sale and was moving to the piney woods of East Texas. My wife liked the idea of Argyle because it's about a 7 minute drive to her job at Peterbilt Motors in Denton. For me, not so close.

Before I knew Shane was moving, he had ripped out his layout and burnt most of the benchwork. This is what the section house looked like when we decided to buy the property. The two columns are brick chimneys that have had sheetrock boxes built over them.

The section house is roughly 85'x14.5' inside, with the middle taken up by two wheel chair accessible rest rooms and two furnaces. The building was renovated in the 1990s and was used as two separate offices. The insulation was also upgraded at the time.