Struggling To Build A Layout In Trainz

 I've gone through YouTube tutorials and have started to embed the various commands and buttons used by Trainz in my mind.  It's been a trial.  I've been trying to create a layout base, and was raising and lowering terrain and placing the base fascia, and the terrain wouldn't raise the way I wanted, or I couldn't raise it close to the base fascia without raising the fascia inadvertently.  The basic manipulation mechanisms are pretty straightforward, but there are a few hidden tricks that are needed along the way, and I really haven't found internet searches too useful ferreting them out - I've just had to puzzle them out myself.

Here are steps to use for layout building, to the point I've reached so far...

1. Use the ruler to determine the basic layout base shape.  The ruler measures in real-world units, even if the route scale factor is set to a scale like HO.
2. Outline the layout shape using base fascia.  This was a pain to figure out.  The facias are object splines - select the object category, then the object spline button, to get these.  Since I just thought they were objects initially, and didn't see them listed in the object list, I figured I needed to download them using the DS.
3. Also, when placing the base fascias, it's best to line up the edges with the black or yellow grid lines.  It's really a pain raising the terrain to meet the fascia top otherwise, as I found out.
4. I tried to download a DS layout that had some nice fascias, floors, walls, and layout features like turntables.  After over 30 hours of download, it finally finished with a failure.  Along the way there were a couple of other failures, Burt a retry would start the download again at the point of failure.  But the third one would not even try to continue.  The result is a route with a broken link indicator.  Now I was seeing items I was interested in my installed content, but by this time I'd realized the story behind fascia object spines, and it's possible I'd had it all along and didn't need to subject myself to the painful download attempt.
5. The fascia I chose was "EMM Model Trainz Fascia Spline".  Working with fascia object splines is a pain.  If a fascia ends at the end of another, they will join and bend.  You have to choose the split button, then click at the exact right point to un-join, at the base of the fascia right at the join, which is hard to see.  Same challenge using the move function.
6. Set the object spline height value to zero to prevent the fascia from raising up when raising the ground near it.  There was a lot of pain figuring this one out.
7. In the topology function, use 5m resolution.  The vertical faces of the layout base are never absolutely vertical, and at 10m don't get sharp enough.
8. Use the topology hight function to set the overall base height.  For the EMM fascia spline, and value of 60 seems the one needed to get the layout base to match the fascia height.