Factorio Forums

Basically what the title says. In order to avoid having train station names like iron 1, iron 2, iron 3 and so on I followed MiniBetrayal's tutorial (with some modifications) for a smart train station: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSB5JLQ6FDQ.
It basically works by having parking stations instead of a "regular" stacker before the pickup station. Said pickup station then calculates how many trains it can fill and enables as many parking stations. The parking stations are also disabled when a train enters it in order to stop trains pathing to it.

The schedule for the trains looks like this:

• Dropoff until inventory empty
• Waiting until 1 second passed
• Pickup until inventory full

The station also contains a bypass lane so that trains that couldn't access any parking station would just go around the pickup station and back to base. However I found that if all waiting stations were occupied, and therefore disabled, trains would instead try to path through them directly to the pickup station which is the exact opposite of what I wanted to happen. The image below should give a pretty clear idea of what's going on:


So I'm wondering if there is any way to make the trains use the bypass lane and skip the pickup station if the waiting stations are disabled as MiniBetrayal said would happen in his ~2 years old video.

Just add an empty pickup station on the bypass lane and set the condition in a way, that the train wont wait there.

Or expand your waiting area.

Man now that you say it it seemed so obvious, thank you!

Expanding the waiting area wasn't really in the plans since I want the outposts and dropoffs to be smaller and later on have a large central parking area so that trains run when needed, we'll see how that goes.

Thanks again and have a nice day!