Help with modelling strategy [TRAINS]!

nalmeida

Hi there guys, my name is Nelson Almeida and I'm from Portugal. I've been using Sketchup from some time but mostly to model buildings and such. One of my hobbies is model railroading and recently I've been planing to model some Portuguese trains, I also have a CNC and would like to use it to help me model some trains.

My problem is that the trains I want to model are to "round", one of the features I'm not familiar in Sketchup is to work with curves so I would appreciate some help from the experts. First a photo and the plan of the prototype:

As you can see it's fairly round.

So my questions are:
What to would be the best strategy to approach this model?
Where to start?
Are there any plug ins I could use?
Since I plan to model it in HO scale (1/87) should I model it in real scale dimensions and downsize it later to 1/87?
Is Sketchup the right tool for this project?

Thanks in advance for any help,

Nelson