After trying a bunch of other people's rail books I ended up being not satisfied with any of them and decided to make a rail book to my own liking - one that manages to simultaneously be minimalistic, easy to use, and do everything I want it to do - and I hope other people will like it too.
Link: https://factoriobin.com/post/abdttx
The basic building block of this rail book is a 50x50 tile roboport grid and it's designed for 1-4-0 trains sticking to right hand drive. All blueprints are designed to be fully rotationally symmetric and as many design elements were reused as possible - the fork consists of two corners and some widened lines to bridge them, the cross consists of a few forks rotated around each other, etc., which will hopefully make base expansions significantly easier.
Unloading stations push requests onto the global circuit network when no train is heading towards them, loading stations cancel them out when a train is heading towards them. This makes checking unfilled demands in the network very easy - simply hover over one of the large power poles, any positive signal in it represents an unloading station that is not having its' demand met, which makes figuring out what to expand next very easy.
Unloading and loading stations have automatically assigned priorities based on how much stuff they have. They are also designed around it being possible to fit four of them in a single 50x100 scaffold and are made to be as compact as possible, which makes densely packing stations easier than with any other rail blueprint book I tried using. Simply align them by the chain signals to place them, select the exact good to unload or load, and connect the green wire from any of their medium power poles to the global circuit network to set them up.
All trains are generic and pre-programmed - they will automatically fulfill any requests in the network that are of the right type (cargo vs fluid).
Everything is properly signalled so you won't have to deal with that.
However:
1. Ideally you want to have at least N-K+1 trains at all times (calculated separately for the two types of stuff), where N is the total number of loading stations of that type and K is the number of unique Loading stations of that type. For example, if you have 3 iron stations, 1 copper station, and 1 brick station, N-K+1=5-3+1=3 trains. Stuff won't immediately explode if you don't have this number of trains, but you might get edge case issues where most or all of your trains are sitting full of unwanted goods in shunting yards.
2. You need at least as many shunting yard stations as you have trains. The shunting yard blueprint includes 8 of them, so slap it once for each 8 trains you make.
Credit: u/dododome01 helped me with inspiration for the unloading station design.
A book of automated LTN-like roboport grid rails for vanilla Factorio 2.0
Re: A book of automated LTN-like roboport grid rails for vanilla Factorio 2.0
Version 1.1 - improved the signal placements on the shunting yard and station skeleton blueprints to avoid "can't place signals too close" issues and improved blueprint icons: https://factoriobin.com/post/pixlp6
Re: A book of automated LTN-like roboport grid rails for vanilla Factorio 2.0
Extra considerations: it would be possible to eliminate the requirement of having at least N-K+1 trains to avoid backlog problems, but it requires a global clock and I don't think that solution fits the ethos of this rail blueprint book, as it makes for much harder expandability - it would need an automated way to get the number of stations in the network and assign a unique identifier to each one, and I don't think those two things are possible in vanilla factorio.