Quirky Stacker - a stacker for differently-sized trains

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.
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TaxiService
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Quirky Stacker - a stacker for differently-sized trains

Post by TaxiService »

Hi. One day a thought crossed my mind:
"wouldn't it be cool if i could stack trains with different lengths in a single stacker?"
I looked on factorioprints... and then the forums... but I wasn't able to find anything about this. :o

I wanted a stacker with these characteristics:
- it must be vanilla
- it must reliably stack two train lengths (with "short" trains being half as long as "long" trains)
- It must have no embed train stops
- it must not have combinators between two tracks; all combinators must be grouped together

Countless hours later, I came up with this.
Image
(click the picture to go to the factorioprints page)

It's a modular design for a stacker that does just what i wanted. which is:
If the incoming train is short, it will be routed to a lane with another short train in it. (if there is one)
If the incoming train is long, it will be routed to an empty lane only. (or wait for a lane to clear)

You can set it to have as many lanes as you want (within reason) and to be as long as you want.
I provided blueprints for some track lengths, but if you want longer track lengths i've also included some building blocks to make your own... building blocks. :|

Additional info can be found on the factorioprints page.
(also related, the "HOW I CAME TO THIS CONCLUSION" spoiler in this thread)

Here is a picture with a possible configuration.
Image

Now, I have yet to write a thorough text-/picture-based guide on how to use the blueprints. :( it takes a lot of time for me to do this kind of things.

For right now i've just made a video in which i explain how to combine the blueprints together; you can check it out over here.
I also try to explain how the circuit works, but i'm bad at doing that. For a detailed explanation... you'll have to wait for the text guide. (If i'm lucky it's gonna be out in 12 hours.)


So... yeah. Isn't it cool? I think it's cool. 8-)

Feedback, suggestions, bug reports and all that stuff will be appreciated. ;)

Also, have you ever seen anything like this before? If that is the case, please let me know!
my mods and 'prints

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