Welcome to the forum. Your first few posts are moderated, so there will be a delay in them appearing (especially over the weekend), but that passes quickly.
How much space do you have? Do you intend this to be a diorama, or an operating layout? If an operating layout, you might need some additional space for staging. As noted, you can reduce the size of the real-life facilities to a degree, but only you can say when it becomes too small to represent the actual place in your mind.
Sharing some information about your space, era, and intentions for the layout might help others help you.
Good luck with your layout.
Byron
Layout Design GalleryLayout Design Special Interest Group
Modeling large prototype structures or locations with full accuracy is almost always beyond the reach of those of us who have not been granted unlimited resources. Fortunately, we can usually capture the "look and feel" through selective compression.
My own case in point... I'll be including a c.1900 rail-to-sail wooden coal pier on my layout, if I were to build an accruate scale model of the prototype, it would be 15-20 actual feet long in HO ("that ain't gonna happen!") so I'll model the essential parts - a 3 foot long access trestle and 4 feet worth of coal bunkers. Not an exact model by any means, but it will serve as a destination for those coal gondolas coming from the colliery... which, BTW, will also be a compressed representation.
Jim
Hello. Has any one out there modeled (in HO) the Lehigh Valley RR yard and shop complex in Sayre, Pennsylvania? A massive complex in its early 20th century heyday. I grew up in Sayre, would like to recreate the complex in a new layout, but find its complex mix of buildings and tracks seriously daunting. I have excellent period photos from the Sayre Historical Society to refer to. Then maybe it's simply too large to do it justice and should ditch the idea. Any thoughts?