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Sounds like you're making some progress! How about posting a few pictures if you can? Always fun to see progress photos.

Might want to pick up a copy of Model Railroader's "102 Trackplans" special edition. Seems to have a lot of good ideas for similar size spaces to yours.

Weathering Track I got an inexpensive airbrush for Christmas, so the first thing I decided to do was to start weathering the track. I followed the advice given in one of Lance Mindhiem's articles in Model Railroader. I started off giving everything an airbrush coat of Polyscale light gray...

Fascia Board A little more progress - I ripped some 1/8" masonite I had lying around down to 6" width and made a fascia board to go around the perimiter of the benchwork. I think 1/4" masonite would have been a little better, but this is what I had and I think it will work out OK. It really...

Thanks for all the kind comments! The photos of the Antillean container stacks are just screen shots from Google Street Views along the river. I grabbed a couple of shots and lined them up together and printed them out. If you look close, the perspective is a little goofy from one end to the...

Well, my son's football season is over, so I've got some time to start working on the railroad again. I decided the next step was to start building up some more elaborate mockup buildings to get a better sense of the dimensions, style, overall look, etc. To make the mockups, I started...

Here is the latest, and hopefully final version of the trackplan.

Today's Progress Had a few hours available this afternoon, so I was able to get the last of the track laid on the shelves. The only track remaining is in the mini staging yard, but that has to wait for a trip to Hobby Lobby for a code 83 #4 RH turnout. The first photo shows the final track...

Simple Video System for Hidden Staging To be able to monitor the hidden staging tracks I was thinking about a simple video camera like this one. There are scads of them on EBay for $29.95 I already have a small LCD video monitor (a cheapie that normally mounts in a auto seat headrest...

Good question... I am planning to build these warehouse buildings primarily out of styrene plastic. I'm going to have to do some research to see where I can get the detail parts. Again, I'll rely heavily on descriptions by other modelers on internet sites to see how they did this. I imagine...

Nephthyr: The track is Micro Engineering code 70 flex and ME #6 turnouts. The staging tracks will be Atlas code 83 flex and Atlas #4 turnouts. updallassub: The buildings mock-ups are 1/4" foam board held together with Elmer's glue and scotch tape. There are also a few cardboard boxes of...

Stranded bus wire would have been easier to work with, but I couldn't find the 'suitcase' style crimps at my local Home Depot. The soldering is not that big of a deal since I have the iron hot to connect to the rails anyway. If it was a larger layout, it probably would have been worth the...

More Progress (continued) For track feeders, I am using a heavier gauge doorbell wire (20 gauge solid I believe). I solder these to the bottom of the rail joiners roughly every 3 feet or so. They feed through to the underside of the shelf and then are soldered to the 14 gauge solid bus wires...

More Progress (continued) I also managed to get all ten turnouts laid along with most of the track. I decided to solder all of the rail joiners. I've seen posts extolling the virtues of soldering and of not soldering, so I decided to play it safe and solder. I figure that being in a basement...

More Progress Got a lot done over the last week or so. I decided to go ahead and extend the existing 1/8" masonite backdrop along the north wall and just cut out a hole for the thermostat that's there. The backdrop is only 14" high - I might end up wishing it was taller before I'm all done...

Well... it may not be the 'best' way, but here is what I am doing. I pin the plan down with push pins every 8-10" so it doesn't shift around, and then I go along with a sharpie marker and push right through the paper into the foam along the track centerline every couple of inches...

The paint is dry enough, so I move the full scale trackplan plan to the benchwork. Getting everything to line up correctly is a bit of a challenge because the walls are not exactly perpendicular and I need to make sure the track passes through the east wall at the drywall and not at the...

Here is the current, and hopefully final, version of the trackplan:

While the paint is drying on the benchwork, I decided to start laying out the track using the 1:1 print feature of XTrkCad planning software. This software is just fantastic, as is the price (Free!). A roll-fed chart printer would have been nice - but I had to suffice with printing the...

Forward Progress: Well I've gotten the last of the benchwork (shelf work?) erected and the foam board glued down. The bench work on the East and south wall were once the home of an aborted attempt at an 'N' scale layout, so the foam was pretty marked up. I decided to give the whole works a...