Mine elevators are cool but they're ultimately useless as they only go up, so you're better off just hearthing rather than walking back to the elevator, minecarts could be a cool option to travel the mines and also transport ores from where you're mining to where your elevators are. (could be also funny haha if they damaged people in their path when they're traveling)
Provided the rails themselves arn't prohibitively expensive, this would make transporting ores less tedious, make paths through the caves more fun (assuming you actually can ride them), solve the annoyance of needing to move carts through tunnel paths, make mine elevators more useful, and early world TW problems of miners
