Model Trains: a beginner's guide

This is the beginner's guide to model trains. Each topic has one or two articles behind it — read this page for the overview, or jump into an article to go deeper on one question.

Where to start

Settle on a scale and how much space you have before anything else — that's the step beginners skip most often, and the one that's most expensive to undo.

How to use this guide

The learning path below is in order; later articles assume you've read the earlier ones. You can also skip around — every article links back to related terms, plus the previous and next article.