https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3 ... ng_Windows
IOW, resizing can be done with any window,
and works exactly the same way that it does on any desktop. You just click and hold on the border, and drag it.
1/ Getting the skin onto that model is about a one-minute-with-brain-in-neutral job, once you know how to do it. That includes starting from a bare default file and importing the model. It is definitely not the sort of job that will always take half an hour of misery.
2/ Speaking of which, that "little useless box" is simply the default cube model that is in every bare starting file. You can see it labelled as "Cube" in the overview panel at upper right.
You want it gone? Easy. Select it (right click) then go find the "Delete" button on your keyboard. Click that there button. Guess what happens?
Oh, you deleted Elephant by mistake? No worries. Hit Ctrl+Z. Elephant will come back.
You can also delete the default camera. It's of no real use for what we are trying to do.
3/ Rotating the model. It's pretty straightforward. The 5 button on your numpad, over the the right of your keyboard, toggles you from ortho to perspective and back again. The other numpad buttons are all hotkeys for various views.
The 1 button gives you the front view. Ctrl+1 gives you the back view. 3 gives you left side view. Ctrl+3 gives you right side view. 7 gives you top view. Guess what Ctrl+7 does?
2 and 8 do rotation up or down around the horizontal axis. 4 and 6 do rotation around the vertical axis.
9 spins the model 180 degrees around the vertical axis.
Or if you want total freeform, hold own Alt+LMB (Left Mouse Button) then drag your mouse to spin the model anyway you like. You can also use Shift+Alt+LMB to pan in any direction.
If the model is incoveniently placed, you can use the period . button on the numpad to centre the view on the selected object and zoom in on it.
3/ The Alpha setting for texture set to 1, in combination with the Alpha for material being set to zero, will allow transparent sections of the skin (like the gaps between wheel spokes) to be transparent in the viewport. If you are just looking at a loco body skin that has no transparent areas anyway, it makes no difference. Sooner or later though, most likely sooner, you will be grumbling that your wheels look solid and why is Blender doing this? I gave you the settings to avoid that.
The other settings are ones you don't have to worry about unless you want fancy renders. Ignore them. The only thing I usually bother with is turning down the specular on material. I find knocking it back to 0.1 or 0.05 works well with the basic lighting I use.
4/ Importing all the widgety parts at once (mass import) would be cool, but unfortunately the bloke who wrote the import script for us didn't include that option. That's not a Blender fault. It's down to the custom script. I do not currently have the Python skills to code a mass import for the custom script.