How do you plan rail placement?

[Greybeard_LXI]

I keep running into a problem where I run my mainline near a resource patch and when I add a station the station overlaps the ore patch. Or at least it is so close the loader is on the patch. I’m getting better at this, but as I get more ambitious and need a stacker I run out of room.

I run two parallel rails and do not have signaling problems. Maybe not optimum signaling, but I can fix (so far) any problems I find.

Let me express my current game frustrations that led me to ask this question.

My game goal is to consume 6,000 science per hour with some improvements in how I organize things. I am using 1-1-1 trains, but sizing stations and stackers, etc. to handle 1-2-1. The mainline goes west from my starter/home base/mall. I am using RSO. I have a track east of my home base that brings in raw resources for the main base. The research base and silo will be west of home.

I built a trunk south of the main line for resources. I found an area with iron, copper and oil west of the trunk and built a line south of it and then started a station. When I completed the stacker I found 10 or 20 tiles between the track and the ore – no room for a station. So I tore that up (Yea blueprints/construction bots/Tiny Start mod) and took the trunk over 100 tiles south and over to build the outpost.

I next wanted a smelter between the resource outpost and the mainline. I found a spot to build off the trunk and added a stacker and stations (stations ran to the north) and then started to lay out the smelters. I ran into the mainline. I tried to adjust the smelter (head west instead of north) but that doesn’t look like it’s working well.

Any hints of how to plan the tracks to not run out of room?

[Selvek]

My new preferred strategy is to have a blueprint with a complete station on it - miners, station, and intersection w/ the main track. That way I literally just place the blueprint on top of the ore patch, then route the main train line to the intersection.

I have a couple of variants (1 station or 2 station loading) depending on ore patch size, as well as a mining drill extender blueprint for ore patches that are bigger than my default.

[PanTobi]

"TL DR" ? XDDD

Rail placement ?... u mean Trains and other stuff with this ? xDDD

Tobi

WWEQEEQW.png (47.93 KiB) Viewed 2209 times

;x....
lel...
im not sure i help u or not... but NOW u know how i build my Own Trains ^_^

[Frightning]

I would first of all like to suggest moving to 1-way trains, (and 1-way rail) as they have better performance and making stackers for 1-way trains is a well-travelled road (there are many examples on these forums of them). I found in working on my kilobase that most ore patches, even with maximum ore patch size are still small enough that a 1-2-0 train has enough throughput to keep up with the miners, so I saw little reason to use longer trains until I was at a sufficiently large scale that train traffic was causing inefficiencies of significance (which I never even got close to that kind of size scale with that save). You can even run two 1-2-0 trains to the same outpost if you really need high throughput (because ore patch is particularly large), since they will naturally stagger into a pattern of one being gone delivering its load while the other is loading at the station and then trading roles back and forth.

[Greybeard_LXI]

Thank you all.

It looks like my best option is to start from the space constraint (ore patch, etc.) and build back to the main track. At my level of train volume keeping the main track straight would be a nice to have, not a necessity.