I've always admired HO rail setups. But who has room to run toy trains? If you just concentrate on the model making, that's fine. It runs to a of money though, even by hobbyist standards. I've confined myself to non-running cheapo toys made by Maisto, in some weird scale a little smaller than HO.

This pic is of my 'n-scale' which is under half the size of 'HO' and even at that size it can still take up more room than you have for it.

Hmmm... whatever scale my Maisto pieces are, you'd have to work out from the size of a typical GP 40 type road engine, which Maisto makes about 4 and 3/4 inches.

I would hazzard to guess that would be roughly 'TT' then.

Small though they are, I still can't lay out a decent length train. Hitch on a few box cars, a tank car or two, some hoppers, and a caboose, and it's off the end of the living room table... But they were cheap, reasonably accurate, and relatively small, and that was about all I needed. I do have a non-functional GP 40 and one of the old style 50's diesel engines in HO. I bought them at the Salvation Army because they were painted in CN colours and only a couple of bucks each. It didn't matter if they ran or not, and I presume they don't.

You might get a kick out of this site, http://www.wymann.info/ShuntingPuzzles/
These fellas will build a switching puzzle in a shoebox.

Interesting. But I suspect the magic phrase "static diorama" is the key to my problems, should I decide ever to get sort of serious about model railroading. In the meantime I keep my Maisto items in a plastic shoebox, and the (non functional) track in another.

I understand that this started as an 'April fools' type of joke in Japan but has taken off like a rocket instead, http://jiisan2003.hp.infoseek.co.jp/
and here, http://t-trak.cincy.home.insightbb.com/
The smallest size of module is 8.5" X 12.125", and you can get an amazing amount of scenery into that little amount of space. I built one with some rock work on it and I use it as a static display for some of my nicer locomotives. My RR club even has a division just for these little buggers.
Here is a page with my module and two loco's, http://www.hbplantrr.org/N%20%20SCA.....Page%206.1.htm

Hope this might help in inspiring a nice static diarama for you.