Looks Great

I'd like to see more photos. Do you have a track plan? How big is the layout?

Details!

The room the layout is in is roughly 8x12'.  This is the phase one configuration.  It is Model Railroader's "Beer Line", scaled down to N and translated to Vancouver, WA.  I'll have some more photos as I get farther along.

Forgot to mention...

  There is a 10" filler module that goes between the 6' long module across the bottom and the one in the right corner.  I am also going to flip the trackplan on that 6' section so that the yard is on the right side and I can extend the tracks a bit.  I should have a capacity of 26 fifty foot cars in the yard.  I plan on train lengths of 8 - 10 cars.

  This is the fancy picture from MR.  Of course all the industries will be different

Creating longer passing/run around tracks

Your track plan looks good, however, you have made your run-around track unnecessarily short in the area on the right, displayed vertically..  You can move the lower crossover down to the bottom of the module and gain a couple of feet (not sure exact scale) on the run around/passing track.  With regard to the town displayed horizontally.  If you move the right crossover to the right, you could also extend that passing track by a similiar amount.  This move would affect your ability to serve Schuster's warehouse by rail, but if you narrowed the building, or made it a near "flat" with the back left off and the interior detailed on the operator's side, you could add a spur to restore rail service there.  

Jeff Fry-cramming Tennessee Pass into his basement.

Moving stuff around...

   You raise some good points, and I have thought of some of that too.  The "fancy" trackplan is drawn for HO scale, and I agree, it is a bit tight.  If you look at the XTrackCAD picture, you will see some little green rectangles on the tracks.  Those are 50 foot boxcars.  Because I translated the MR trackplan into N, but kept the modules almost the same size as the HO units, I gained quite a bit of real estate.  I can run around a string of 10 fifty footers on both of those passing tracks. 

   The other thing about this plan as it was drawn and built by MR, is that it was designed to be operated "from the outside" - note where the people are standing.  I will be "inside" the layout, so a bit of tweaking will have to go into my placement of structures, etc.

   This is also only Phase I of the layout.  Once I have these four modules well underway, I plan on taking the two on the right loose, turning them counter clockwise 90 degrees and move them to the top right corner.  Then I will construct 2 new modules to fill in between which will have another passing track, and an interchange/staging track, as well as a couple more industries.

   I can always tweak the plan and change my mind as I go along.  In fact I have already done some of that as I have been testing 3D computer models in my Google Sketchup mockup of the layout.  I have also been considering chucking the whole "interchangeable module" idea, as I will probably never actually pull the layout apart and take it on the road as a stand alone.  The whole idea of making the track align at all the module joints kinda scares me....

Clearance sale!

I spent the weekend cleaning out a TON of old electronics, Computers and radio gear from the layout room and garage in general.  My pickup truck is about half full of stuff to take to the recyclers tomorrow.  Anyone need any 3.5" floppies or blank cassette tapes?  YIKES!  I even have an old full height 5.25" floppy drive in there.

  Some of my buddies came over yesterday and took a bunch of the computer stuff to play with.  I spent today clearing off the shelving units in the garage, vacuuming up the layout room and garage, and organizing the piles into some sort of organized mess that I can deal with!

  I now have room on some of the shelves that I can use to clear off my workbench and get the layout benchwork cleaned off and ready for foam later this week.  I still need to shim all the benchwork shelves and get the screws located to attach them to the brackets, but it feels so good to be moving in the right direction and making good progress.

 Yeah, that is a truckbed full of 20 years worth of crappola!