Welcome to Trainz and to the forums, Harry. You are in for a treat and a different world that will consume you in ways you can't imagine.
Now that Shane as you all patched up and registered, I'll give you some tips on route building.
I'm not sure if you've ever built a model railroad before, but the process is similar. Without going into the fine details on running Surveyor, I'll do this as an overview. You can always ask questions later and we'll give you the details. I do suggest though that you take a look at the Surveyor and Operations forum page. There's a ton of information in there about building including tips and tricks, and other goodies.
Where do you begin? This can be quite overwhelming at first. When you start Surveyor, you're presented with a blank 720m^2 grey and white grid. I don't even recommend doing this, but instead opening other routes in Surveyor. You can open up all routes in Surveyor whether you download them or they're built-in. This will show you how the route creator did stuff. How he textured the landscape, built his points, laid track, and all the good stuff. I did this at first when I started building. After getting ideas and experimenting, I started on a route which I've had for over a decade now. Yes, I started this in TRS2004 when that first came out, and I've added on to it, rebuilt it, modified it, and it's still growing and very much alive today.
What's really nice about this hobby is you can have multiple routes of various sizes and none of this takes up physical space. You wouldn't believe how many real model railroads that I've built in the past only to have to rip them down for some reason or another. Oh, the wasted track, boxed up buildings, trains, and everything else. The wasted money on plywood, plaster, and other materials. This stuff gets pretty expensive and when you have to chop it up and put it out for the trash men, you cringe inside on the amount of money lost.
Anyway, now once you've poked around and got your feet wet, you can try your hand at building. Start small! I started with a 4-baseboard route, one baseboard at a time. This doesn't sound like much, but as you build and add-on, you're route will grow quickly. Now keep in mind that there are various ways of carving and sculpting the landscape. These range from hand modifying using the topology tools to importing Digital Elevation Maps and creating a realistic as possible route. There really is no limit to what you can build in Trainz, as you'll find out, other than your imagination and what your computer can handle. This latter point brings up another important issue. There are tons, upon tons, of assets out there, or over 260,000 available for download as of today. You don't have to put them all on your route, or download them to your hard drive. You can, but this will cause major stutters as your computer tries to cope with all the objects. This you will have to figure out on your own through trial and error. Speaking of the content. There's no reason to download everything you see on the Download Station. Pick and choose your content. There's no one stopping you, but the reason I say this is the more you download, the more you need to backup. The additional content also makes the program load slower and the content menus to load slower. Like any model railroad, this route will be constantly improved. Your modeling techniques will improve over time, and what was once awesome to you in the beginning won't be up to your new standards. With this you'll cut out things, add in new, rebuild, redo, and everything in between. This process alone can be a whole hobby within its self. This Surveyor part can be a whole time-consuming, real world consuming lifetime in its self.
As one final suggestion which I forgot to mention above. Please, oh please backup your information often. Your whole Trainz install can easily by copied in full to an external device. At first the copies will be small, but as you add content, this can become quite huge. The worst thing that can happen is you'll lose everything, including your own work, and I'm sure this is something you don't want to happen.
John
