Factorio Forums

I would like my trains to, if the stop they're aiming to go to is full, to go to a parking lot instead. So I have the following setup:

- A train is set to go to Green Circuit Pickup until it has full cargo inventory, then Green Circuit Drop until it has empty inventory.
- It has an interrupt, with the condition of Destination Full or No Path
- The Target of this condition is a station called PARKING.

Now, my question is: what condition do I put on the Parking interrupt? There's an unfortunate behavior where if I make it something like 5s has passed, then the condition is filled. Which is fine if it then can't find a path and restarts its Parking interrupt again until a stop is open. But that's not what happens:

- A full Green Circuit train looks for Green Circuit Drop, and does not see one available. So it goes to PARKING.
- Full train waits for 5s.
- Full Green Circuit train heads to the next stop, which is Green Circuit Pickup.

What would you do in my shoes to remedy this?

Other context that's probably relevant: Stops are enabled or disabled by the control behavior of the contents at their stops. If more than one full cargo load is available, the stop becomes available. All stops have a hard-programmed train limit of 1.

I can second this. I am trying to get my trains from clogging up stations by using a yard. There is no way to make the train wait somewhere until the next destination station is full since you have to be specific which station is to be the destination for the condition. It would be cool to have the train just wait for a few seconds and recheck whether the station is no longer full as you described...

There is a condition called "station not full" that lets you choose a station, but it seems in your case that using that wouldn't solve the issue (I would test if anyway if I were you, just in case).

Not tested, but if you add another interrupt with condition "green circuit > 0" with your green circuit drop station as the target and cargo empty as the condition, it should work. You could (and should) then also remove the Green Circuit Drop from your schedule entirely, and the interrupts will handle both the Drop station when the train is full and parking if the Drop station is full.

For doing that you just have no wait condition on the parking stop. The train will go there and wait until a receiver gets activated. So the schedule would be "go to pickup until full, then go to dropoff until empty" and the interrupt would be "if not at parking station and destination full, then go to parking, no wait condition". If you leave the underlined part out the train would start "flickering" because the interrupt would send it back to the parking station immediately.

The real question however is:
Why do you want to get the green circuit pickup free in the first place?
The train not finding a valid receiver is an indication that currently there is no demand for green circuits.
And you want to free the pickup station, send the train to a depot and get another train filled up with green circuits while that train could easily do something more useful like picking up items that are currently in demand?

Imo the train waiting at the pickup station for a receiver, while it's blocking the station, is not really blocking the operation. Even more so, it's helping the operation since it prevents other trains from picking up stuff that's not in demand.

I would just put the parking lot right before the drop off location, then just use chain signals to keep them in the parking lot until the stop opens.

You can either do small parking lots for each drop off location or one large one that splits off into multiple drop off locations. Use the train limit feature to budget a number of parking lot spaces for each drop off location.