Chunk-aligned modular railway system with LTN Stations

Smart setups of railway stations, intelligent routing, solutions to complex train-routing problems.
Please provide - only if it makes sense of course - a blueprint of your creation.
geomod87
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Re: Chunk-aligned modular railway system with LTN Stations

Post by geomod87 »

I'm starting to get LTN hooked up. I'm using this set of blueprints for my stations.

I'm have trouble trying to get the fluid provider station to actually dispense fluid via the circuited pumps. I see the station sends a signal to a combinator which converts the value to a negative, then checks if that value is greater than 0, which should output L. I'm not quite sure I understand this signalling. All of the pumps are enabled when L > 100 and hooked up to the combinator with input>0 -> L.

The schedules are all getting created properly, a train pulls up to get loaded, and has it's unload station in it's schedule, but the pumps never activate and the train won't load and just times out. (completely empty train btw). Is there something I need to input into the combinator (in lieu of L maybe) to get this working?

Thanks (I'll provide screenshots when once I'm off work)

https://imgur.com/a/0dv8ZJE

Civrock
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Re: Chunk-aligned modular railway system with LTN Stations

Post by Civrock »

smalltalk wrote:
Tue Apr 07, 2020 5:28 am
Hello. is there an issue with the depots?

The fuel requester is fine, but the stack inserter is disabled when "0" is a negative number. I dont understand what these different signals mean and there is no cable connecting these constant values to the fueling inserters.
I am having this same issue as well. Fuel is transported to the depot but when a train stops there it will not be fueled.

wildmanal
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Re: Chunk-aligned modular railway system with LTN Stations

Post by wildmanal »

Civrock wrote:
Wed Jul 01, 2020 8:17 pm
smalltalk wrote:
Tue Apr 07, 2020 5:28 am
Hello. is there an issue with the depots?

The fuel requester is fine, but the stack inserter is disabled when "0" is a negative number. I dont understand what these different signals mean and there is no cable connecting these constant values to the fueling inserters.
I am having this same issue as well. Fuel is transported to the depot but when a train stops there it will not be fueled.
If you connect a red wire from the combinator to the power pole above it will start to load the requested fuel.

mrvn
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Re: Chunk-aligned modular railway system with LTN Stations

Post by mrvn »

geomod87 wrote:
Mon Jun 22, 2020 6:04 pm
I'm starting to get LTN hooked up. I'm using this set of blueprints for my stations.

I'm have trouble trying to get the fluid provider station to actually dispense fluid via the circuited pumps. I see the station sends a signal to a combinator which converts the value to a negative, then checks if that value is greater than 0, which should output L. I'm not quite sure I understand this signalling. All of the pumps are enabled when L > 100 and hooked up to the combinator with input>0 -> L.

The schedules are all getting created properly, a train pulls up to get loaded, and has it's unload station in it's schedule, but the pumps never activate and the train won't load and just times out. (completely empty train btw). Is there something I need to input into the combinator (in lieu of L maybe) to get this working?

Thanks (I'll provide screenshots when once I'm off work)

https://imgur.com/a/0dv8ZJE
There is a red wire missing from the yellow constant combinator of the LTN stop to the OUTPUT of the "<each> * -1 = <each>" combinator. The yellow constant combinator outputs what should be on the train and the combinator is supposed to compute how much of it isn't on the train yet.

Note: The decider combinator is kind of wasted. You can set the pumps to "<liquid> > 0" directly. Allows loading different fluids at a station as well.

syncness
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Re: Chunk-aligned modular railway system with LTN Stations

Post by syncness »

Hello,

I noticed a bug in your blueprints (https://www.factorio.school/view/-KpbH6bzIae1s5eo0g3s), in that the track curve for all the stations seem to clash with the belt curve.

Image

Have I simply got an outdated blueprint?

Thanks

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Re: Chunk-aligned modular railway system with LTN Stations

Post by Faciro »

syncness wrote:
Tue Aug 25, 2020 2:22 pm
Hello,

I noticed a bug in your blueprints (https://www.factorio.school/view/-KpbH6bzIae1s5eo0g3s), in that the track curve for all the stations seem to clash with the belt curve.

Image

Have I simply got an outdated blueprint?

Thanks
Try the updated book at: https://factorioprints.com/view/-M-gLfVHJstwMyNzr044
OP havent updated their book in years.

syncness
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Re: Chunk-aligned modular railway system with LTN Stations

Post by syncness »

Faciro wrote:
Tue Aug 25, 2020 4:28 pm
syncness wrote:
Tue Aug 25, 2020 2:22 pm
Hello,

I noticed a bug in your blueprints (https://www.factorio.school/view/-KpbH6bzIae1s5eo0g3s), in that the track curve for all the stations seem to clash with the belt curve.

Have I simply got an outdated blueprint?

Thanks
Try the updated book at: https://factorioprints.com/view/-M-gLfVHJstwMyNzr044
OP havent updated their book in years.
THANK YOU SO MUCH.

AcidUK
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Re: Chunk-aligned modular railway system with LTN Stations

Post by AcidUK »

wildmanal wrote:
Sun Aug 09, 2020 3:50 am
Civrock wrote:
Wed Jul 01, 2020 8:17 pm
smalltalk wrote:
Tue Apr 07, 2020 5:28 am
Hello. is there an issue with the depots?

The fuel requester is fine, but the stack inserter is disabled when "0" is a negative number. I dont understand what these different signals mean and there is no cable connecting these constant values to the fueling inserters.
I am having this same issue as well. Fuel is transported to the depot but when a train stops there it will not be fueled.
If you connect a red wire from the combinator to the power pole above it will start to load the requested fuel.
Thank you for this. It seems to load the front locomotive but not the one at the back, don't suppose you know a fix?

syncness
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Re: Chunk-aligned modular railway system with LTN Stations

Post by syncness »

AcidUK wrote:
Fri Aug 28, 2020 11:54 am
Thank you for this. It seems to load the front locomotive but not the one at the back, don't suppose you know a fix?
Make sure the red wire is connected.

For other people, what's with the combinator box in the universal logistic provider?

Image

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Optera
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Re: Chunk-aligned modular railway system with LTN Stations

Post by Optera »

syncness wrote:
Tue Sep 01, 2020 3:21 am
For other people, what's with the combinator box in the universal logistic provider?

Image
If these blueprints still use my original designs those would be pre-calculated 2^n values for encoded positions. See: viewtopic.php?f=214&t=60334

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Re: Chunk-aligned modular railway system with LTN Stations

Post by LonelyExplorer »

Hey. should it work in 1.0 version of the game ? Couse my Fluid stations and some solid stations doesn't work, they dont pump/insert items into wagons.

Rick160601
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Re: Chunk-aligned modular railway system with LTN Stations

Post by Rick160601 »

hi,
I love your blueprint book and I'm playing with it now on our multiplayer server. However, I placed down a uranium outpost and a full liquid loading station which is being supplied with sulfuric acid, but the liquid trains from the depot just won't drive between them. Occasionally, the console text shows: "[LTN] No station supplying Sulfuric acid found in networks 0xffffffff".
what do I do with this issue? everything seems te be set up fine, just like the solid loading and unloading stations... The loading station is getting more then 100k sulfuric acid signalled from the logic network, so it should be supplying... :?:

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Re: Chunk-aligned modular railway system with LTN Stations

Post by teshiron »

AcidUK wrote:
Fri Aug 28, 2020 11:54 am
wildmanal wrote:
Sun Aug 09, 2020 3:50 am
Civrock wrote:
Wed Jul 01, 2020 8:17 pm
I am having this same issue as well. Fuel is transported to the depot but when a train stops there it will not be fueled.
If you connect a red wire from the combinator to the power pole above it will start to load the requested fuel.
Thank you for this. It seems to load the front locomotive but not the one at the back, don't suppose you know a fix?
This is hella late, but I found this thread after I started trying to use these blueprints yesterday. I had the same issue getting the fuel to load, so I tried wildmanal's advice but then I had the same problem as AcidUK. So I decided to poke around a bit and figure it out, and post the results so every future player won't have to re-invent the blueprint designer's wheel. :lol:

TL;DR: The correct fix for this issue is to adjust the arithmetic combinator -- it is already wired correctly in the blueprint, but the combinator isn't set. Change the input from "each * 0" to "each * 'Encoded positions of every locomotive' signal", as below, and be sure to remove any extra wires if you added any.

Image

Very long explanation, hopefully useful for understanding the design: What the blueprint circuits are trying to do is only enable the inserters when a locomotive is present in a particular position, so it doesn't put fuel in your empty wagons. LTN provides a signal for this purpose, "Encoded positions of every locomotive," which is a number in what some call "binary encoded" format (which a programmer might recognize as a bit field represented as a decimal integer). The value of the signal is a number that, when converted to binary, represents the position of each locomotive as a 1 and any other wagon (or empty position) as a 0.

For example, let's take an LCC train. There are six positions in these depots, so from left to right that would be 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0 (remember we don't care whether the space is a wagon or empty, just if it is a loco or not). When you're figuring in binary you start from the right, so we'd write that as 000001. That's also the number 1 in decimal, so the signal would just be the number 1. An LCCCL train would be 100010 "forwards", but 010001 in proper binary notation, or the number 17 in base 10. To read the signal, let's say we see a value of 5, which is 000101 in 6-bit binary. Remembering to flip it around to go left to right, that's 101000, meaning there's a locomotive in the first and third positions.

Now that we know what this signal means, how do we get the inserters to activate at only the right positions? We have to convert that number, 5 or 17 or whatever, to a signal that tells each inserter whether it should be enabled. Because of the way that Factorio stores signal values internally, multiplying a number by specific powers of 2 and seeing whether the result is negative or positive will tell us whether a particular bit in that number is 1 or 0. This is what Optera was referring to by linking to the thread about binary decoders.

That's why the constant combinator is there -- starting with signal "0" for the first bit/position, it outputs the values of 2 raised to whatever power is needed to evaluate each bit, which the arithmetic combinator then multiplies by the value of the position signal. This gives us a set of signals on the red wires on the medium poles in the depot, where each signal from 0 through 5 is a number that is either positive or negative, depending on whether the bit value in the LTN signal is 0 or 1 in that position. This tells us whether there is a locomotive at that position in the depot. The inserter at each position can then be set to activate only if the corresponding signal is negative (less than 0).

This is why hooking up the red wire from the constant combinator directly to the medium power pole (bypassing the arithmetic combinator) will "fix" the head end of the train, but not the rear -- the numeric value needed to evaluate the first bit happens to be negative, but all the rest are positive, so if you do that you're basically "hard wiring" the first position to be on and the rest off.

Hopefully this will help everyone to diagnose any other issues with unexpected behavior at stations!

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