There is nothing more constant than change

And I'm still not satisfied. To quote Heraclitus: "There is nothing more constant than change."  He must have been a model railroader.

I *really* don't like how I've had to arrange (force) the track arrangement on the west end to allow for the loop.

I don't like how the west end approach to the wall for staging presents itself visually.

I don't like how I'll probably have to compress and steepen the slopes from back to front to keep within the 27" back-to-front that I've now allotted to myself.

I don't like the way that I cut the town in two with the spur to the power plant, though it would be nice to have rails going through the town.  (Lowell has some of that, and also Tecumseh and Blissfield, two other small towns in south-eastern Michigan that I'm familiar with).

And I'm only going to have a 15" radius on the end loop-backs so I won't be able to run a passenger train.

So I begin editing - again.

I decided to trash the double main line.  I'll run track along the back wall for the continuous loop.  Much of it will be hidden in a tunnel, so there's more space to do mountains and the elevations won't be quite so abrupt.

I looked at some more examples of mines on layouts (especially what appeared recently in Mountains & Coal in Model Railroader magazine February 2018 - article page 46, picture page 50).  Many layouts have mines with sidings running along the main line, and some even run the main line under the conveyors.  That's what I decided to do.  I dropped the west loop down vertically as far as I thought reasonable (2% grade down) and moved the mine onto the main line with a 2% grade up, so the main line goes over the loop with about 3 inch clearance.  (That might be a bit tight when taking the benchwork into account, but I'll address that later). The three coaling tracks along with the through track are essentially a four-track double-ended diamond yard layout.  The far west end of the mine ladder leads into the wall and the Erie-Pittsburgh west end staging.

And I'm going to revisit what my industries are.   I was listening to an older release of the podcast The Roundhouse (September 17, 2017) with Bernie Kempinski as guest, and they discussed modeling a steel mill.  That's always been one of my secret goals - having a nicely modeled steel mill.  So I ran over to Great Lakes Hobby and Toys and bought a copy of Bernie's book The Model Railroader's Guide to Steel Mills (which became the sixth or seventh of his books that I own).

After reading Bernie's book and going back to re-read some sections several times, I decided that I did not want to dedicate enough space on the layout to do a steel mill justice, even significantly condensed.  But I did come up with another idea that I liked almost as well. (How's that for a cliffhanger?)