Hello!
Clearly it's a version related crash. Prior to 2.1.9 game has never crashed for me during the autosave and as a matter of fact I have never experienced any kind of crashes with the game before.
How come you suggest it's a hardware related issue and what do you mean by hardware specifically ...

Hi, I was playing around with automatic train system and the "problem" you described is the one I just finished solving.
Check out my definitely-not-overcomplicated system and see if it suits your needs. It's definitely not perfect since I have a few more ideas on how to address some more edge-cases ...

I have been playing around with a similar design and this is what I came up with:

Outpost preview
How it works:
there is a clock set to 600 sec by default. Each minute it checks if the time is right for an artillery train to show up
Clock explanation
L is the limit so only one train shows up ...