My “mine line” has two diodes placed over by the mine. One is close to the mine and the other is spaced further away.
The close diode lets me park short trains/railbuses at the mine platform, or head in “engine first” and the further diode allows me to push the five mine cars to the platform stopping just short of ramming it.
A toggle switch allows me to “jumper over” the further diode when running short stuff.
Just a note …If you bang your head and accidentally swallow a beach ball NEVER, I repeat NEVER take a diode ! Talk about being rectified!!
Well it running, a bit of trial and error, well a lot of trial and yes a lot of error. It’s finally running. I tried to salvage some of the existing wiring which didn’t work so I scrapped it in place connected everything simply according to the diagram, still had bad problems, like dead spots, spontaneous reversing and so I tried something stupid, I swapped the main power feeds with each other because in the very very scarce manual it appears where the positive and negatives are connected was important to making the power switching work and it worked! Now it’s hiding the wire, reballasting and I took out a small short section of track on the lower right siding to install a small townscape. It needed something visually up there.
Sounds like good progress has been made. And for future reference can you show that with pics or drawings ? Do the spur tracks still operate as normal if you switch to them?
Inquiring minds would like to know. 
The spurs are now just for car storage. The nature of the shuttle prevents operations. I plan to eventually extend the curve to nowhere on the drawing to a mine where I want to install another diode to run the shuttle to that location. The upper layout was always just a point too point so the shuttle is the best use for that section. I could do switching but I would need a battery/RC loco for operations… maybe down the line.
Thank you Vic , I wasn’t sure what you wound up with.
I’ll take some update pictures this weekend, not much to see other than the new buildings