>>8507214One of the guys who tried to keep /mrg/ alive before it died a slow death here, lemme try giving a hand.
Your plan really depends on where you're located geographically and what you can find on ebay/train shows. Guessing by your pic you want to do either French or German rolling stock, but let's use German for this example since I'm a bit more familiar with it and I know for sure that German stuff in N/Z is a lot more common than French stuff.
First up lets talk scale. N is 1/160 for German stuff (N scale varies between countries due to track gauges), so if you want to include some tank/vehicles/figurines/whatever you're a bit in luck. You'd MAYBE get away with using some 1/144 stuff, but I wouldn't try it. Z scale stuff is in 1/220, but also has a lot less stuff lying around to use. Just by going off the variety of stuff available to work with let's lean with N for this.
Now here's where things get a bit tricky. While you can get away with using n scale track made by a local company (IE if you're American grab a couple of feet of Atlas flextrack), you're gonna be sourcing your models from either 3rd party sellers (Ebay, Craigslist, etc) or model railroad shows. The latter's a bit fucked over due to COVID right now, so you're stuck with buying online for the moment. Ideally you want to be hitting $15 per train car, although if you're lucky enough to find a lot of multiples you can probably get that for cheaper (Recently I won a lot of 5 Reefers for roughly $55 shipped, averaging out to $11 per car).
The real big problem is if you want a destroyed Engine in your yard scene. Most ebay listings will be for working engines, but if you hunt around enough you'll find a junker being sold for cheap that'll work for what you want to do. You just have to be vigilant and keep an eye out for this stuff. I know that may be rough, but that's the cost of wanting to model a railroad that didn't run in your continent.
