I have a large smelter with 12 pickup stations in a row (all named the same). The issue is trains will only use the first 4 stations, with 8 others unused. Even if I set those 4 stations to be disabled if a train is present, other trains will wait at a signal until that station is free, instead of pathing to the next available station because they are too far away...
Seems there are are some solutions;
1) have all rails leading up to the stations equal length like a fractal design
2) give each pickup station a unique name (pickup 1, pickup 2, etc...)
Neither of these is ideal, the fractal layout will take up too much space (I'm using 4-12-4 trains), and trains will still favor one side since the route is not perfectly symmetrical. And giving each station a unique name will be tremendously tedious task setting train schedules, or "priority schema" using TSM mod on some 40-50 trains (and I'd probably run out of symbols to use). This is just for the copper side, iron, steel, and plastic would have to be done in the same fashion. I would not want to do that for 150+ trains.
How have you gotten your larger than 4 pickup station layouts working?
Multiple Pickup Stations / Train Pathing
Re: Multiple Pickup Stations / Train Pathing
Make use of the pathfinding penalty for signals.
https://wiki.factorio.com/Railway/Train_path_finding
"When the rail block is guarded by a rail signal set to red by the circuit network -> Add a penalty of 1000."
Make all entries to your stations double signals, connect the second signal to the first, with condition "close on red".
By adding a 1000 tile penalty, the other 4 stations should become viable for the pathfinder.
https://wiki.factorio.com/Railway/Train_path_finding
"When the rail block is guarded by a rail signal set to red by the circuit network -> Add a penalty of 1000."
Make all entries to your stations double signals, connect the second signal to the first, with condition "close on red".
By adding a 1000 tile penalty, the other 4 stations should become viable for the pathfinder.
Re: Multiple Pickup Stations / Train Pathing
I'll give it a try.
Edit:
Works surprisingly well. Even better, in conjunction with disabling the station if it has less than the average of all other stations. Trains are using all 12 stations very fairly evenly. Even if a train's destination station was disabled en-route, it stops close enough to an open station and quickly re-routes to it. I let it run for an hour with no backups and all stations well stocked for pickup, and relatively even in contents. The base only gets 20-25 ups when running science so it's slow going to find bugs.
https://imgur.com/a/G9NpFxV
Edit:
Works surprisingly well. Even better, in conjunction with disabling the station if it has less than the average of all other stations. Trains are using all 12 stations very fairly evenly. Even if a train's destination station was disabled en-route, it stops close enough to an open station and quickly re-routes to it. I let it run for an hour with no backups and all stations well stocked for pickup, and relatively even in contents. The base only gets 20-25 ups when running science so it's slow going to find bugs.
https://imgur.com/a/G9NpFxV