My Best Piece of Advice for Starting your own Garden Railway

Start small.

Go ahead and draw up a grand plan for a railway that takes up your entire backyard, front yard, part of your neighbour's yard, and loops around the dumpster out back of the convenience store on the corner. But when it comes time to build, choose just a small section of that plan and complete it -- plants, structures, everything. You'll learn things that will help you avoid some of the horror stories that have turned others off the hobby for good, or led to a divorce (not speaking from personal experience here).

Expand your railway empire by doing another small section start to finish. This is how the real railways did it. Don't overextend yourself.

After a section or two, you might find that you don't want to complete the grand plan after all, particularly when you learn how much maintenance (weeding, for example) is involved.

Funny how this advice is routinely offered by older, wiser, more-respected garden railroaders than me, and nobody listens to them either.