Overall Design

This is the rough overall design for the layout. It will be double-decked and each grid square is 1 foot. The main yard will be in the upper right hand corner of the room instead of along the wall. The peninsula will be "smoothed out" but the general layout is roughly correct.

The basic premise is that you are going from Minneapolis/St. Paul into the Dakotas on a "combined" main line for Canadian Pacific and BNSF Railroads. In reality, the tracks are separate, but I'm combining them for purposes of this layout. You leave the lower staging yard (lower left of picture) and work your way around the room and into the helix (lower right corner) to go to the upper level. 

There will be a combination of run-through freight trains, Amtrak and VIA Rail passenger trains, as well as lots of operations with locals originating from the main yard (lower deck, top of picture) and 1 or 2 smaller yards along the mainline.

Car and Locomotive Fleet

One of the non-construction things I've done recently is to build a web-based fleet manager application. This will let me manage the fleet when I'm out shopping at train shows, for one. The system also lets me track my media, such as books, magazines, digital issues, etc. so that I don't end up buying the same book twice.

After getting the app working, I found out that I had 40 locomotives and 161 cars. After creating sample engine pairings, it also appears that I can put one or two engines on each of 16 staging tracks. I also have a number of 4 axle units for use in switching and local trains originating from the yards.

Cars are a different story:
10 MOW cars
31 Amtrak passenger cars
10 intermodal (stack, spine cars that are either 3 or 5 units)

That reduces the 161 down to 110 cars for actual freight service. I need to spend some more time designing the industries around the layout, which will then drive the car purchases. Given the typical industries and cars that are in use, I can see buying a lot more covered hoppers, tank cars, and boxcars. Even though boxcars are less used now, I'm not planning on building an intermodal yard -- those cars will be passing through and not being switched.