Too many stations for my personal transport

[Amarula]

I am looking for suggestions to replace the train schedule for my personal transport, as I have too many stations to manage with the current vanilla train GUI.

What do I have? I call it a sector-based train system: each sector has inputs delivered by train, which are processed into the sector product, which is made available to be picked up by delivery trains from other sectors. For example the basic green circuit sector has trains to pick up iron and copper plates, which it transforms into circuits, which are delivered to red circuits etc. Those delivery trains work fine with the new train GUI; they have one station to pick up and one to deliver.

I also place a siding in each sector, so I can go visit any sector using my personal transport, and have a place to park that does not block any of the "working" trains. Each siding is named for its sector e.g. Siding Green circuit. As I add sectors, I add each siding to the "schedule" for my personal transport. I use the product for the sector as the condition for that stop so I have a visual indicator as well as the sector name. When I want to visit a sector, I jump in my train, and select the siding from the list.

For the first 20 sectors it worked great. For the next 100 sectors (up to 120 stations) it was okay. I am approaching 200 sectors and I just can't do this any more. Scroll down past every single existing station to get to the end of the list in order to add each new sector; then move it to its correct place in the list (which might be very close to the top). Scroll down through the list to find the sector each time I want to visit. Yes the ones I visit most are near the top but they can't all be at the top

Ideally I would like the ability to group stations, and to hide the contents of a group, as if it was a display of folders. Having the ability to search for a station in the schedule would also help. I do understand that this isn't a priority for the developers, for the huge majority of the schedules that contain two or at most a handful of stations.

Yes I do use the new ability to set a temporary stop, but it is almost as much pain to manually scroll around the map to find the station I want to go to as to scroll through the list of stations.

Just for curiosity, how many stations do you have in your largest train schedule?

Personal transport train schedule snapshot:

Screenshot from 2019-06-14 10-45-40.png (357.67 KiB) Viewed 2625 times

[boran_blok]

now actually, shuttle train lite might be still of help here, despite it being a .16 mod.

You enter a train, start typing your destination, press . and off you go.

I have dabbled in the code a bit, and maybe I could see if it is manageable to get it to .17

[Serenity]

There is a 0.17 continuation of shuttle train:

https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Shuttle_Train_Continued

[mergele]

When adding a new station in the train shedule GUI you can hit ctrl+f (or click the magnifyng glass icon) to open up a search box. You could for example type "Siding nuc" and then only get all your Stations listed which contain "Siding nuc". If you have a consistent and strict namingsheme that might be sufficient.

[Amarula]

When adding a new station in the train schedule ...

Yes searching to _add_ a station works fine. Hmm so if I add the station when I want to go there, I can take advantage of the vanilla search every time. I simply have to remove the station from the schedule when I am done (or whenever the list starts getting too long to manage). I think I will give this a try.

I did check out shuttle train lite; while it does indeed provide search capability, it seems to have a lot of other elements that I don't need. For example I never need to summon the train as I always got there by train. I also looked at shuttle train continued, but the documentation doesn't actually say what it does, only that it is the same as shuttle train.

Thanks all for your input!

[zOldBulldog]

This is one thing that has bugged me for a long time, not just for personal trains but also for other purposes.

My instincts tell me to use the same station name and to use a constant combinator to enable/disable it.

...Unfortunately, you can't enable/disable a constant combinator through the map view.


Now, if they ever made it possible to enable/disable constant combinators through the map... that would be awesome. Heck, I wonder if there is a mod for that?

[mmmPI]

...Unfortunately, you can't enable/disable a constant combinator through the map view.

But you can have a 2 headed train that act as an on/off switch, if you built it on a straight track with station at both ends and signal that read the position !

This way from far away you can turn on the station you want . ( or also power up combinators )

you would still have to find it on the map thought.

i had the idea from this post : viewtopic.php?f=193&t=62531

Just for curiosity, how many stations do you have in your largest train schedule?

Never as many, worst/best case would be 15/20 to supply the defenses when i don't use enable/disable stations all named like NWdefense1 2 3

Given the scale of the factory i wonder if it would be practical to have some sectors dedicated to be intermediate transportation hub.

Let say like 4 topleft, topright , bottomleft, bottomright, when you arrive at one of them you can have another train with only 25% of the total sector in schedule ; or multiple colored train to match which sector they are scheduled to ,set to wait for passenger like real taxi ; or even those combinators that you turn on to unlock the precise sector in case you need to use the same wagons which would require identical name for some stations.

But still seems over-engineering compared to this

When adding a new station in the train shedule GUI you can hit ctrl+f (or click the magnifyng glass icon) to open up a search box. You could for example type "Siding nuc" and then only get all your Stations listed which contain "Siding nuc". If you have a consistent and strict namingsheme that might be sufficient.

I was adding unnecessay 'aaaa' in stations names to find them easier before i've learned another thing today.

[mergele]

I was adding unnecessay 'aaaa' in stations names to find them easier before i've learned another thing today.

I prefer a "__"-prefix for these cases.