Mike, I'm getting winded running all over to keep up with you! Have you made up your mind what size rolling stock you want? The weight has a lot to do with how you make the tablework. Are you going to make foam mountains? Are you going to use plaster, real rocks? How many pounds of wiring, rails, engines, and all that will it have to support? Will it be modular, sectional, all one flat table, double decker+? Will it ever be moved to another house, or just scrapped? What happens to it when you grow up, get married, have several kids that don't like it, or you lose a job or get transferred to Irak, or you get too old to reach over to vacuum the dust off,,, can you lean on the foam? You are asking questions without staying put so we can help you. You have to tell us what you want, then we can tell you what it takes to do that. Then you can sell the house and car and buy all the stuff you need to do it! Buy it from us of course! HA! You'll see guys crawling out of the woodwork to help once you state a size.
For instance, I have an HO layout, six and a half feet wide, eleven feet long, runns four trains independantly, at the same time, has a roundhouse turn table, yards, and a harbor dock with overhead crane, a town with working street lights, flood lights at the turntable, and all signal lights work when a turnout is changed, and two mainline tracks are elevated. The whole layout tilts over and is mounted on casters for ease of rolling through a standard house doorway. Almost all the scenery is complete, all track and control pannel is complete, and a complete step-by-step manual of operation teaches you how to run the whole layout from engines to the blinky light on the big oil storage tank by the harbor. It cost $6,000.00 to build, and I am putting it up for sale soon for $2,000.00 cash. If I don't sell it by the time I'm ready to wire the layout I'm building up staris, I'll scrap it out and junk the wood. Maybe that will give you an idea, The largest I have had was 28 x 36 feet, and the smallest, I still have is 34 x 42 inches, its on casters, and rolls under a bed. You can do anything you want, see, my dad started me out with a 3 rail toy lionel Hudson. He built a layout in our basement with the Royal Gorge bridgem the Grand Teton mountains and a flat Kansas plains with yards. I still have pictures of it.