>>10029537Like that other anon said, you're not going to get a "top tier" realistic layout in that small a size. The Hornby track mat is roughly 4'x5', which is barely enough to fit an HO/OO layout on in the first place. Sizing things up to a 4'x8' table will give you plenty of real estate to build up a nice layout.
Assuming your bare minimum requirements are a continuous run and the layout being "realistic", you can definitely make something work. Take this track plan I nabbed off of Model Railroader's site, you've got
>Track is actually varied in design and isn't just two and a half loops clogging up most of the tablespace>Two small yards to do switching on>7 track-served industries, with room for one or two more depending on how you do your scenery>An actual town in the middle instead of two random cottages>Scenic points of interest such as a mountain with tunnels going through it, one city (St. Albans) being higher up than the other (White River)And the best part of modelling is, if you don't like the source you could always change the layout to fit your needs. This layout's meant to be based on some North-Eastern railroads like the Rutland and B&M, but you could easily use this for any east-coast railroad like the Pennsylvania or Lehigh Valley or Norfolk & Western. Admittedly it might be harder to adapt a US trackplan for a UK railroad since the railroads had their own philosophies on how they ran and designed their stuff, but I imagine there's just as many UK track plan sources out there as there are US ones.
The most important thing to do before starting a trackplan is to think about what you want your layout to be? Do you want a busy LNER layout covering a station on the main line? A GWR layout that covers the terminus station on a small branchline? A freelance layout that doesn't cover some exact place/time? Think about the when and where of your layout before you think about how your layout looks.
