Operating on the Red Oak project layout

A friend of mine recently made the mistake of exhibiting a bit of interest in getting into the hobby, and since then he’s had to put up with my evangelizing/haranguing him about it. He has very little space where he lives, and mentioned he has thought about N scale in the past. I wanted to recommend he look at the Red Oak project layout series that MR did in 2015.

The four Red Oak articles MR did don’t seem to cover operating the layout. I was wondering if anyone with experience in this area might have ideas?