Ray,

Start your PIC journey by reading

http://www.piclist.com/techref/microchip/intro/pic.htm

Start really simple. DO NOT attempt to write the train speed controller
until you are really happy with the writing , assembling and programming of
your code.

Start simple. Flash an LED. It's supprising the amount of things you have to
think of just to flash an LED. This deals with the fundamentals of setting
up the chip correctly and control I/O ports. Once you get that working you
can gradually migrate to bigger and better programs.

If you start too big you'll never know if it's your code, the assembler
(tools), the programmer or the hardware you've designed.

Go from controlling one LED to writing to your serial to parallel chip (or
whatever it was) but stick LED's on the output of the other chip. Then but
very large delays in your code and visually watch the signals propagate
through the PIC and through the other chip out to the LED's.

Then worry about what data you are sending, and in what order and timing.

The last thing to do is connect the 7-segment LED's.

Do all this with absolutely NO input to the PIC. Just make some random data
up and write this out of the chip to the 7-seg' LED's.

Then maybe progress to sampling an input pin and making a measurement of it.
Display the result on the LED's. Finally take the measurement and
scale/calibrate or signal process in what ever manner you like and send it
to the LED's.

The biggest key is to start simple and build up the project bit by bit and
only progress onto the next bit when you are happy you know what it's doing.

Your first project will probably take a long time so stick with it. You
cannot learn about the PIC and program and build your first large project
all in one day.

Regards
Pete

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