Designing My HO-Scale Room Layout

[steinjr]

So maybe I should just build a 4x8 just so I could have something to run trains on, it could be built in a reasonable amount of time and I could practice building scenery and if I mess up it would be not big deal. Would this be a good plan or should I do something different ?

It is not a big deal if you "mess up" no matter what kind of layout you build. If you mess up, you just change whatever you didn't like and try again.

You already know what the challenges with a 4x8 in a bedroom is. If you still want to do a 4x8, it is your room, your money and your time, so you get to make the choices too :-)

Personally, I feel that your smartest option is to neither make overly big plans nor get overly defensive.

You drew up several good (in my opinion) track plans for a shelf layout along two walls. This one is my favorite among the ones you drew:



Looks reasonably easy to build, gives you plenty of room to experiment with scenery. Spurs can always be adjusted a little if you decide you want them to run slightly different. Buildings can be swapped in and out to create very different scenic looks, like on Reinhard (faraway)'s layout. It is a decent test bed both for scenery and for operations, with fair chances of reuse - wholly or partially, depending on what kind of layout you later want to make.

But in the end it always comes back to the fact that it is your layout, and you will have to decide what you want to do.

Whatever you decide, I wish you the best of luck.

Smile,
Stein