Build Your Own Model Railroad
The first questions were,

1. What scale and how big to build the layout.

I decided on HO because it was the good size to for the engines and cars, and was the most popular. However, if you live in an apartment or have little room to build, I would definitely recommend N scale. The engines and rolling stock may be too small to comfortably handle, but the layout out itself, will be perfect. Villages, mountains, and countrysides can be done much easier in N than HO, and for a lot less money, and the layout will be the right size for an apartment or small room.

If you're going to do it on a 4 x 8, or even 4 x 16, I would definitely go for N scale. Never again would I try to build a small HO scale layout. They,'re no fun. You spend a year building it and it's no fun. You can't run long trains, they just go round and round, and never seem to go anywhere, and everything is curved and they'res no straight track or room for buildings, not to mention mountains, rivers, etc. Unless you've got a garage or equivelent, I would recommend N scale.

O scale, or Lionel scale, is way to big and much to expensive for poor folk like us . You need a huge room to give them any realism at all, and they're so big they loose a lot of the fantasy world that HO and N give.

G scale is even bigger, and is good for outdoors, where you can run them around your backyard, but if you're going to run them outdoors, you might consider the big ones that you can ride. That's how Walt Disney got started with Disneyland.

Z scale is so small it hurts your eyes to look at the indivual engines or rolling stock, but you can build a great layout in a small space. Z is good for a novelty or a background scene to give your layout depth (which I did).

My present layout goes from Hotwheels size in the forground (slightly bigger than HO scale) to Z scale in the background. It's HO scale on the front of the layout, and N scale all around the middle, and in the background I have Z scale, which looks really far away. This perspective gives depth to the overall scene and gives you a lot more countryside than an all HO layout would.