01-20-2009, 12:20 PM
I would add to what Brakie has said by advising anyone who has a club nearby to join, even if only temporarily. I was frustrated in planning various layouts because I always seemed to have less space than I needed for my "dream layout." Then I joined the modular club and discovered that I found running trains around a layout to be boring no matter how big the layout was, and we were 120 feet by 60 feet at the National Train Show last summer in Anaheim. I like switching industrial districts. My dream layout might be 60 feet by 120 feet of industrial districts, like Josh's MET, but I can spend hours switching on a 2 foot by 12 foot shelf, so I came to the conclusion that a big room full of track and trains just isn't for me. I would never have found that out without operating on a large club layout, whether a modular layout that is set up differently every time out, or a permanent club layout.