Have you ever had something that turned out wrong, and then it ended up being more right than you could have imagined?  I had that experience yesterday.  Since the early days of planning my double-decked Tidewater Southern, I had assumed that I would build the Foster Farms Feed Mill that sits just west of Turlock, and in fact, I set about doing just that on this layout.  It's a really cool facility:

Even that balloon track is about as close to a real life example of a 4'X8' layout as you could get.  It was going to be neat.

However, the more research I did the more I realized that not only did Foster Farms only buy the facility in 1999 from Butterball Turkey, that there is no record of this facility existing prior to the 1980s...which is a problem with my imposed 1970 date.

So my options were: keep going, and not let it bother me, or rip up the track and start over, and use the penensula that it exists on for something more prototypical.

And then yesterday, I was thrown a lifeline.  I was looking at a track diagram of the Turlock area and realized that this part of Turlock:

looks a little like the track I had already laid for Foster Farms:

With only a minor bit of tweeking, what was Foster Farms can now become the south side of Turlock.  It makes more sense prototypically. It makes more sense operationally, since the only siding I had room for ends in Turlock. I get to model a much bigger slice of the town, and I get to build a whole bunch more packing sheds.  What's not to like?  Sometimes in the quest for greater accuracy you have to make compromises that are very difficult, but sometimes things just sort of work out!