I'm brand new to model trains and before putting my money down I wanted to get the benefit of some experienced opinions.
This will be a non-permanent layout. My idea is to pick up a few 4x8's from Home Depot and fashion a 7x11 foot top to sit on top of our pool table. It's got a 4x8 foot play surface, and with the walls around that this would hang off approximately 15" in each dimension. I can potentially shave a couple of inches off each way but any more than that would require redesigning the track. We'd probably leave it up for long periods at a time but not all the time. I definitely can't stretch it any bigger, and I haven't found anything I can trim off the track to make it smaller without significant changes.
No piece of track is more than 3 feet from an edge, so I think I've got reachability covered without a need for a hatch. I'm not sure where the controls are going to go yet - perhaps in the lower left or upper right?
The grand loop and "swoop" have nothing less than an O48, the inner loop uses a few O36's. I'll be using a Lionel starter set (Great Northern Mountain Mover) with Fastrack so it runs fine on O36 but the bigger loop will look a little more realistic. The lower left corner is O72. btw, the color coding is just there to make it easier for me to tell 5" from 4.5" and 1 3/4" from 1/38". Red and light green are the smaller elements, purple and darker green the bigger ones.
What do you think of the overall design? There are two things I feel are a little lacking that I might work on. First, there's no reversing feature anywhere. Second, there are not two 100% independent loops to be able to run two trains without having to watch for collisions. Do you think the lack of either of these will be an issue for long-term interestingness of the layout? I was trying to come up with something more unique than nested ovals or figure 8's but I'm very open to suggestions.
What I do like is that it has three separate paths to travel (grand loop, swoop, and inner loop) plus a yard and room for a second one if I wanted to. There is also room for an O36 circle inside the inner loop in the upper left - maybe to run a trolley someday?
Because it's not going to be permanent I don't expect to get heavily into decorations at this point. Probably spray the wood green, maybe get a plastic tunnel for the upper left curve, just relatively simple stuff. I'd like to add some trees eventually to simulate a northwestern forest but nothing too elaborate. It's mean to be more of a train to have fun with than a hardcore detailed simulation. Maybe one day I'll have a bit more room for that kind of stuff.
Is the track too close to the table edges? There are only a couple inches unused in the short dimension, a couple more in the long. This software (RailModeller) shows full width track so I'm certain it doesn't hang off.
Anyway, whatever advice you have is welcome and I'd love to see ideas of other layouts that would fit on a 7x11 foot table if you've got some 
I'm the kind of guy who wouldn't mind doing a different shape every few months or so just to keep things fresh...
Oh, one last thing... If anyone knows a way to make Fasttrack line up without having to use all these stupid tiny pieces I'd love to know about that too. It's frustrating having to pay for 3-4 pieces of track to do the job of one just because you need it to be a little longer or shorter!
