Some layout help needed!

[DarkTalon]

Alright, I don't know how many of you check the General Disc. board..but I recently won this: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&ssPageName=STRK:MEBIDX:IT&item=280270160862   Now then, while I kind of like the layout so far.. I feel it's a tad busy and  has too many grades that will make scenery difficult and very unrealistic.. so what can I do short of completely destroying the track work to make this a nice small layout?

 

a couple more photos:

 

THANKS!

[ARTHILL]

It is a busy plan for the size. I had one like that and filled it with mountains, tunnels, bridges, water falls and a lake. There was not much room for towns and industry, but was fun to build and run trains on. I built that with screen and plaster. I would use foam now. You can get the shape right, do that carving and painting on the work bench and just set the pieces in place. With good use of cliffs and tunnel portals it could be dramatic. You could put a mine in a deep box canyon where the spurs are. Here is a pic of my attempt to put the Lost Dutchmen mine in the Superstition mountians at the Massacre site. Adding one turnout anyplace could get you to a later addition is you have the space.

[tangerine-jack]

Well let's see, if that was in my garage I would build some catenary, get some interurban passanger cars and build and inner city layout complete with apartment blocks and offices.  Busy track is just fine and not all layouts need to be in rugged mountains or even haul frieght, this little gem of a layout will be just fine with concrete jungles as scenery.  You will knock yourself over with joy seeing how much interurban passanger operation you can get from that little layout.  Keep those trains running and on schedule, no room for being a slacker- one late train means several hundred people will be late to work, meetings, picking up kids from school etc etc etc.  You can run maybe five or six trains on that amount of track (DCC of course).  Wish I won that on Evilbay.......