After looking at the two layouts I’d initially come up with, I realized that the first layout had the spurs laid out better than the second. In the first, you could have a locomotive pointing to travel counter-clockwise, and have it pick up rolling stock either at the train station or along the bottom spur, and everything would work out fine.
In the second, you couldn’t! If you set up a locomotive to pull cars from the station and travel clockwise, it would then be set up to pull cars from the spur backwards, the front of the locomotive would couple with the cars, and that’s not great!
So of course ten minutes after my first post I had to redo my layout. Here’s the new layout, where everything works for clockwise travel!
I’m sure this won’t be the last time I need to tweak the layout. I’m going to guess that the two switches next to each other won’t work for some reason, but I won’t find that out until I actually get the track in hand.