Factorio Forums

Hi, could someone please help me with trains. Just need some info so I can put it in practice for other trains. I’m a bit confused with it all. I’ve tried finding out exactly what I need to do but can’t get the answers.
So basically, I want to bring a full red belt of iron ore back to my base. I’ve found a patch of 19m ore where I have put 60 miners, which I think is enough for a red belt. It will fit about 80 miners on it.
What I want is someone to draw out or a pic of exactly what I need to bring it back. Like how many wagons, how many chests, fast inserters, stack inserters etc. Also how I load and unload properly. The outpost mine is about 10 seconds away by train. I’ve tried looking at vids but can’t get exactly what I need. Any help would be greatly appreciated, especially a drawing or pic. Many thanks

It seems you're trying to make the second step before the first step.
Train handling is something you need to grow into. If you just stamp a bunch of blueprints you got from somewhere onto the ground, you will not get a feeling of what is required to get and keep trains rolling.

So start with the obvious:
- you need rail tracks from the mine to the smelters to get trains there and back again.
- you need a loading station at the mine
- you need an unloading station at the smelters
- you need a train with locomotive and wagons

Try to do this yourself without using blueprints from somewhere. Just try to do all this yourself and manually.
An station is usually 4 buffer chests per wagon (unloading station) or 6 (loading stations), filled by fast inserters and emptied by stack inserters (loading station) or both stack inserters (unloading station). 2 buffer chests fill one lane of a belt, so 4 wagons get 16 chests that results in 4 full belts that can be used by your smelters.
I got my first idea of how stations could look like with this guide: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJBvw28bQu0

At some point, you will see what will work and what will not work well.
For example, you will probably observe that one mine, regardless of its capacity, is not enough to reliably feed one smelter factory because of the time required for loading, moving and unloading. So 2 mines (and 2 trains) will work out far better. In general: you more loading stations than unloading stations.

After you got an idea of how trains work in general, you need to make a few core decisions:
- how many wagons per train (this will define how your stations should be built)
- uni- or bidirectional tracks
- uni- or bidirectional trains (bidirectional trains = trains that have 2 locomotives at their ends to enable them to drive forwards and backwards)
- if unidirectional tracks, left-hand drive or right-hand drive, and the distance between the rails

My first rails on my first map were bidirectional, one track.

After that, for all of my other maps, I decided for trains with 1 locomotive and 4 wagons, unidirectional with 2 parallel tracks, right-hand drive, distance between the 2 tracks: 4 tiles. Seemed a good balance between everything for me. Worked out well so far.