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HI! First of all I would highly recomend before you start buying equipment, pay a visit to a local drugstore or what ever that sells international press. By ac opy of MR related magazines and try to figure out what you like from what you see in those pages. In general, Modell Railroader and RMC are good choises aswell English press. English people are masters of small but efficiant layouts. I don't know if you can read German, but they have in last few years upgraded their magazines and are filled with plenty of usuful information. This is highly my opinion, but I guess that they have quite often very good ideas of compact layouts, though they are bigger than English. If you do read German, the best bargain in the world of Modellrailroading is CD rom made by german Miba-magazine called "Modellbahn Spezilitäten" You get 56 issues of hard to find issues of Specials for a fraction of what they would cost at the newstand in printed form. Beauty of this by buying magazines, current or earlier issues is that you haven't actually paid to much to find out if you are really interested or not. One other importent thing to buy at this stage are Walthers Cathaloques, to make a picture what is available and how much it costs. By this you get a general idea of whole thing and perhaps new ideas. For second, depending on the staff of your local or favorite hobby shop. You will get some firndly advide there, pay a visit to a local club. First visits you will be impressed by the whole thing and you need a few more to get a critical look. Talk to people there, and you get more personal tips and opinions. This is critical, so you can relate to what you really want and if you can afford it AND fit in the theme of your future layout. By this time you start to get the picture of your purhase list... Thogh the big Mallets or DD40X looks and runs like jewel they need more space eating curves and turnouts to look and operate better. At first go for smaller engines, perhaps a 0-6-0 switcher or a Alco S1-S4 or EMD SW.s. Third, We are finally getting ready to shopping, go for quality but cheaper pricetags. By a small unit and few cars and few pieces of track. Just to get a little taste of it. Thee are quite a few trainsets out there but I would recomend to buy the loco, track, cars and powerpack separtely and you will not be supriced by the fact that the pink Mickey Mouse car do not have a prototype... You get what you want and most cases of better quality. What you need to check is the loco. Is it a smooth runner, does it have flywheels, does it pick current on as many axles a possible, is it serviceable and how much does spare parts cost and are they available?, as you told you are into DCC does it have any provision to easy add on a decoder. Does it easily accept Kadees... Make sure that the cars are easy rolling and so on... The loco is main thing in my opinion, no matter the fancy powerpacks, plastic trestles, great operating track, does not the engine run well, it will ruin your day. Track cleaning is in my opinion not the highlights of this hobby, this is why my modelling has settled to H0-scale or larger. Though the last couple of decades the N-scale has improved quite a lot in every aspects. four: You got an engine (start with a small one) and few cars and some track. Couple the train together and the innocent looking car and the engine suddently becomes looooong and starts to eat some of the alloted space. Here comes the forth part, trackplanning or layout planning. There are numeroius Programs for computers available, the cheapest thing I know is offered on line by Atlas at their website. it is for free. If you wish not work on computer, you can photo copy some key pieces of track and downsizing copies to smaller scale and play around untill you get whatever you want. Or you can buy a book with trackplans and make them fit to your space and location. Kalmbach and others have a plenty of usefull books with this. I hope that this does not scare you away, modell railroading sure is fun. Ollie
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