There must be thousands of books about model train and building model railroads but when you think about it we should not be surprised.

The hobby of building model train layouts has been around for nearly a hundred years now and the scope of the hobby is so enormous that you could write a book about any aspect of life and it would relate to a model railroad in some way.

A model train layout is a scale version of the real world. The scenes set out may not be accurate scale models of real world places but they take aspects of the real world and scale them down into a manageable size to represent a part of the world and a typical scene from the real world and include the trains that are so essential to transport people and goods across the country.

We have had trains and railroads for over a hundred years and in that time there have been many developments from the earliest steam trains though to the magnetic levitation bullet trains of today.

As a railway modeller you can choose to stick to one era of trains or mix them all together to create something that would never have existed in real life with the latest hi-tech trains running alongside some of the earliest steam trains to appear.

There is a wealth of books about the history of the steam train and the development of the railroads. Trains played a huge part in the development of the world and they still conjure up wonderful images from our childhoods and from movies.

It is worth reading up on the history of the railroad to get a sense of how important the train was to people who depended on it for all the goods they needed.

We are not all expert carpenters so the problem of building the table or base for our model train layout can be a big challenge for some people.

You are not likely to want to buy a book about carpentry just to build a base for your model trains but there are specialist books about what you need for a model train layout table and the best ways to build it yourself.

You will need to think about what scale of model trains you plan to use and how much space you have available but there are books that will help you understand how to make the most of the space you have and have a larger model railroad system than you would hve managed without the advice from experienced model railroaders.

Planning your model train track is perhaps the most important part of building a model train layout system. Whatever you are able to do in the future to develop your layout will be affected by the original plan so it is important to get it right when you start.

It is difficult to plan anything unless you understand the fundementals and know what is possible. This is where experience plays such a big part and someone who has been building model train layouts for years is going to know a lot about what is possible from the mistakes they have made over the years.

A book about planning your model railroad layout will help you fit more interesting features into the space you have avallble. The insights you get from the experiences of the author will help achieve a practical working system where everything about the design of the track layout works together to help you to get more satisfaction from your hobby and gives you more pleasure from running your model trains.

If you have never built a mountain before when you decide that is what you want on your model railroad it can be a worry. Where do you start and what materials do you use?

There are plenty of books about building scenery for model train layouts and years of experience have taught the authors how to make realistic looking mountains, hills and cuttings that would take you many disappointing attempts to match.

This is one area where you really do want to listen to the experts as the amount of work will be about the same whether you produce a realistic mountain scenario or something that looks as though it was produced by the kids at the local nursery school.

Practice makes perfect but you can speed up the process by learning from the experts.

The possibilities of what you can do with model trains has advanced considerably over recent years and with the possibility of control of so many features on your layout the wiring can become something of a nightmare.

You cannot get away with just running a few wires here and there when you need to add some extra feature if you want to stand any chance of fixing electrical connection problems in the future. Planning the route of the wiring is a first step and labelling everything will make life a hundred times easier if problems occur.

Planning for possible future developments is a very worthwhile thing to do so allow room for expansion to your train layout and plan ahead how you would connect all the additional electrical controls and wires into your model train control system.