layout for topicals.

I do musical instruments in sets, and no particular order between sets except I have grouped together all the stamps for the J S Bach tercentenary showing 17th/18th century Western instruments. My other mounted topical collections are composers and authors, and in each case I have gone for alphabetical listings by name, with, for composers, separate pages for composers who appear most frequently on stamps (Bach, Mozart, etc).

For topics like birds, I think you need to decide whether you want to keep sets together. If you do, then that points to mounting them by country. Unless you are very scientific, I would not myself go for mounting birds alphabetically by species, but there is a half-way house where you could, for instance, put all eagle stamps together, all owls together etc.

Trains and ships: by country is the simplest. There is an alternative option of using broad categories - eg steam trains, more recent trains, big sailing ships, small boats, steamships etc, and then within these categories grouping by country. But again you need to decide if you want to keep sets together: if you do, a straightforward by-country arrangement is the answer as some sets will span more than one category.

Not sure if this helps!

The American Philatelic Society (APS) has some free pages on there site. Maybe it will give you some ideas....

stamps.org/Free-Album-Pages