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Well I don't consider myself a veteran even though I've been building my 'beginner layout' for about 4 years now, but I do have a few thoughts to share: 1. Decide for yourself what -you- want to get out of your layout. There are all sorts of opinions on what's important: faithfully modeling a prototype railroad, modeling an era, designing your layout for realistic operation, etc. The greatest part of this hobby is that you get to decide what's important on your layout. In my case, my main goal is 'photographic interest' in the sense that my layout is designed to have a number of separate areas that each present a pleasant (and hopefully convincing) scene. The term I've heard is "sense of place" That's what I'm going for. I want to create scenes you can look at and imagine them coming alive. 2. On a more practical note: if you are just starting and want your first layout to be relatively simple, use the table top approach instead of diving into stuff like open-grid benchwork, L-girder, etc. Just don't make the table larger than you can comfortably reach to the middle of (mine is about 5 ft by 8 ft. 2 1/2 feet doesn't sound like that much of a stretch but think about the kind of detail work you might need to do in there when it's time to add scenery. I sometimes wish I settled for 4x8) 3. Don't put any grades (changes in altitude) in your track plan. I did and I'm sure it added a lot of complexity to my layout, but there were certain 'scenes' I just had to have and they required the track to climb hills. It would be much easier to keep all the track on the same level. Also, when creating grades it's really easy to make them much-much steeper than they would ever be in real life, and even those little models might have trouble climing them. 4. To allow for variations in terrain, put all that flat track on 1 or 2 inches of foam so you can carve areas that dip below the track level. I think nearly all the recent beginner layouts shown in MR use this technique. 5. Don't overdo the track. Make something you find interesting but leave lots of room for scenery. They call it a 'spaghetti bowl' look when there's just way too much track for the space. 6. Just get started! It's way to easy to think and think about what you're going to do someday. Don't worry about being too neat and perfect (except perhaps in the tracklaying step when you want to make sure there's nothing to make your trains derail or stall). The amazing thing about a lot of the techniques described in MR and elsewhere, is that they're "self correcting" in the sense that they'll probably look good no matter how you do them. Nature is hardly ever neat and tidy: this works to your advantage when you're trying to model the real world. 7. Have fun! Stan
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