Autonomous Railcar (Un)loader Tile Blueprint

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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Mekronid
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Autonomous Railcar (Un)loader Tile Blueprint

Post by Mekronid »

Autonomous Railcar Loader Tile

Image



Loads two railcars from five lanes on each side. The design is tileable so you can build massive railcar loading stations.

By default every tile will average their input among available chests. The chests will fill evenly which means you can load trains far more efficiently. This allows for much higher throughput at a single loading station.

If you input the [S] virtual item (at any value except zero) into any power pole, then the ARLTs will split the loading averages so you can load a different item on each side.



Autonomous Railcar Unloader Tile

Image



Unloads two railcars into five lanes on each side; each railcar will saturate a single lane. The design is tileable so you can build massive railcar unloading stations.

By default every tile will average their output among available chests. The chests will empty evenly so you can unload trains far more efficiently. This allows for much higher throughput at a single unloading station.

If you input the [S] virtual item (at any value except zero) into any power pole, then the ARUTs will split the unloading averages so you can unload a different item on each side.

---[[[]]]---

I built the ARUT first. It was the harder of the two to assemble even though it uses less pieces! The spaghetti belt arrangement will keep a single belt constantly saturated even when inserters are waiting for an averaged load. A typical 5 lane balancer would not fit into a 6x14 area... But if the lane was already saturated it becomes a simple matter of offloading the contents and keeping the output lane empty. This is the reason why the fourth lane from the center on each side does not connect to the adjacent lane in the next tile - each half tile can saturate a lane all by itself.

After that, it was a simple matter of swapping the positions and activation values of each inserter. The ARLT doesn't need some fancy output arrangement, so shoving as much as possible through the input lane will of course suffice. It can't fully saturate every single inserter with this design, but that doesn't matter since the lag time between trains leaving and entering the station should keep every chest buffered. The ARLT did have a slight hiccup though; dividing ■ by ■ equals 1, so the inserter condition would always evaluate to false. I placed two constant combinators outputting ■ -1 to patch the problem.

I haven't actually tested the arrangement of smart splitters in each design, so I can't guarantee they'll saturate all ten lanes properly. If anyone has any problems with that please let me know.
Last edited by Mekronid on Mon Jul 02, 2018 1:34 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Autonomous Railcar (Un)loader Tile Blueprint

Post by Mekronid »

Oops, I didn't realize there was a subforum for railway blueprints. Maybe someone can move my post there? Sorry, and thanks.

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Re: Autonomous Railcar (Un)loader Tile Blueprint

Post by Koub »

[Koub] Done :)
Koub - Please consider English is not my native language.

mrvn
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Re: Autonomous Railcar (Un)loader Tile Blueprint

Post by mrvn »

Could you elaborate on your circuit logic a bit please?

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Re: Autonomous Railcar (Un)loader Tile Blueprint

Post by zOldBulldog »

I really like your balanced loader. It should be excellent for loading resources from a high productivity load factory.

But I wonder about the unload mechanism. You mention it saturates ONE belt per car. Granted that you do balanced unloading, but there is a thread in the forum that has several designs that almost saturate 4 blue belts per car (provided that you can feed it trains fast enough -.every few seconds if I remember right). In that scenario, would it not be best to use one of those fast unloads and then use a balancer after the fact to try and prevent the drift that makes the unload chests get unbalanced? (Note, I am not criticizing your design, I want to understand the pros and cons of the two approaches)

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Re: Autonomous Railcar (Un)loader Tile Blueprint

Post by mrvn »

The problem there is "fast enough". This will break down in all but test setups. You want o unload a train very quickly into buffer chests but then consume the buffered items slowly. Aim for something like needing a train every 5 minutes. While it is fun seeing trains zip in and out of a station every few seconds the congestion of the rail network will kill you. Better to build 2 slower train stations in different parts if your map than one fast one where trains will collide.

Search for satellite factories.

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Re: Autonomous Railcar (Un)loader Tile Blueprint

Post by zOldBulldog »

mrvn wrote:The problem there is "fast enough". This will break down in all but test setups. You want o unload a train very quickly into buffer chests but then consume the buffered items slowly. Aim for something like needing a train every 5 minutes. While it is fun seeing trains zip in and out of a station every few seconds the congestion of the rail network will kill you. Better to build 2 slower train stations in different parts if your map than one fast one where trains will collide.

Search for satellite factories.
Indeed, his slow but reliable unloader is ideal for a satellite factory.

But sometimes you need throughput at your main factory before you unlock artillery with yellow science to clear the space needed for the satellite factories. A couple bad map generation choices in 0.16 will make you totally dependent on train ore deliveries long before you can do that. It happened to me on the first map I launched a rocket with.

So... I would still like to figure out a fully reliable 4-belt per wagon unloader. I have one that comes close (posted on factorioprints) but under certain conditions it still gets a little out of balance, even though it typically rebalances itself through the normal ebb and flow of adding new mines and others running out. I fear I will not be fully happy until I find a (1) compact (2) reliable (3) 4- belt unloader design. Damn OCD!

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Re: Autonomous Railcar (Un)loader Tile Blueprint

Post by mrvn »

zOldBulldog wrote:
mrvn wrote:The problem there is "fast enough". This will break down in all but test setups. You want o unload a train very quickly into buffer chests but then consume the buffered items slowly. Aim for something like needing a train every 5 minutes. While it is fun seeing trains zip in and out of a station every few seconds the congestion of the rail network will kill you. Better to build 2 slower train stations in different parts if your map than one fast one where trains will collide.

Search for satellite factories.
Indeed, his slow but reliable unloader is ideal for a satellite factory.

But sometimes you need throughput at your main factory before you unlock artillery with yellow science to clear the space needed for the satellite factories. A couple bad map generation choices in 0.16 will make you totally dependent on train ore deliveries long before you can do that. It happened to me on the first map I launched a rocket with.

So... I would still like to figure out a fully reliable 4-belt per wagon unloader. I have one that comes close (posted on factorioprints) but under certain conditions it still gets a little out of balance, even though it typically rebalances itself through the normal ebb and flow of adding new mines and others running out. I fear I will not be fully happy until I find a (1) compact (2) reliable (3) 4- belt unloader design. Damn OCD!
Well, mine is simple: 6 inserters loading into a warehouse. One inserter between warehoues to shift items if they are unbalanced. And then inserters loading onto belts. I guess for 4 blue belts you need 2 rows of 4 inserters per warehouse. Lately I use Deadlocks compact loaders. Does your OCD wonders.

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Re: Autonomous Railcar (Un)loader Tile Blueprint

Post by zOldBulldog »

mrvn wrote:
zOldBulldog wrote:
mrvn wrote:The problem there is "fast enough". This will break down in all but test setups. You want o unload a train very quickly into buffer chests but then consume the buffered items slowly. Aim for something like needing a train every 5 minutes. While it is fun seeing trains zip in and out of a station every few seconds the congestion of the rail network will kill you. Better to build 2 slower train stations in different parts if your map than one fast one where trains will collide.

Search for satellite factories.
Indeed, his slow but reliable unloader is ideal for a satellite factory.

But sometimes you need throughput at your main factory before you unlock artillery with yellow science to clear the space needed for the satellite factories. A couple bad map generation choices in 0.16 will make you totally dependent on train ore deliveries long before you can do that. It happened to me on the first map I launched a rocket with.

So... I would still like to figure out a fully reliable 4-belt per wagon unloader. I have one that comes close (posted on factorioprints) but under certain conditions it still gets a little out of balance, even though it typically rebalances itself through the normal ebb and flow of adding new mines and others running out. I fear I will not be fully happy until I find a (1) compact (2) reliable (3) 4- belt unloader design. Damn OCD!
Well, mine is simple: 6 inserters loading into a warehouse. One inserter between warehoues to shift items if they are unbalanced. And then inserters loading onto belts. I guess for 4 blue belts you need 2 rows of 4 inserters per warehouse. Lately I use Deadlocks compact loaders. Does your OCD wonders.
Mods sure make life easier. But I'm still in vanilla until I complete a few more of the achievements.

But it got me thinking. Smells like it ought to be possible to achieve the same in vanilla. Maybe something like:
- Stack inserters from train to 6 chests.
- Stack inserters from 6 chests to 6 tracks.
- Stack inserters from the 6 tracks to 6 "rebalancing" chests, spaced to allow an additional set of circuit controlled inserters between the chests (these additional inserters do the balancing separate from the load/unload process).
- Then use the 4-saturated-belt unload mechanism from the rebalancing chests.

That way if demand causes unbalance, the circuit controlled inserters can rebalance without interfering with the other parts of the process.

The one doubt I have is whether going chest-belt-chest could reduce throughput. I am not sure if the belt-to-chest stack inserter would be able to maintain the same throughput as the earlier train-chest-belt section.

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Re: Autonomous Railcar (Un)loader Tile Blueprint

Post by mrvn »

zOldBulldog wrote:
mrvn wrote:
zOldBulldog wrote:
mrvn wrote:The problem there is "fast enough". This will break down in all but test setups. You want o unload a train very quickly into buffer chests but then consume the buffered items slowly. Aim for something like needing a train every 5 minutes. While it is fun seeing trains zip in and out of a station every few seconds the congestion of the rail network will kill you. Better to build 2 slower train stations in different parts if your map than one fast one where trains will collide.

Search for satellite factories.
Indeed, his slow but reliable unloader is ideal for a satellite factory.

But sometimes you need throughput at your main factory before you unlock artillery with yellow science to clear the space needed for the satellite factories. A couple bad map generation choices in 0.16 will make you totally dependent on train ore deliveries long before you can do that. It happened to me on the first map I launched a rocket with.

So... I would still like to figure out a fully reliable 4-belt per wagon unloader. I have one that comes close (posted on factorioprints) but under certain conditions it still gets a little out of balance, even though it typically rebalances itself through the normal ebb and flow of adding new mines and others running out. I fear I will not be fully happy until I find a (1) compact (2) reliable (3) 4- belt unloader design. Damn OCD!
Well, mine is simple: 6 inserters loading into a warehouse. One inserter between warehoues to shift items if they are unbalanced. And then inserters loading onto belts. I guess for 4 blue belts you need 2 rows of 4 inserters per warehouse. Lately I use Deadlocks compact loaders. Does your OCD wonders.
Mods sure make life easier. But I'm still in vanilla until I complete a few more of the achievements.

But it got me thinking. Smells like it ought to be possible to achieve the same in vanilla. Maybe something like:
- Stack inserters from train to 6 chests.
- Stack inserters from 6 chests to 6 tracks.
- Stack inserters from the 6 tracks to 6 "rebalancing" chests, spaced to allow an additional set of circuit controlled inserters between the chests (these additional inserters do the balancing separate from the load/unload process).
- Then use the 4-saturated-belt unload mechanism from the rebalancing chests.

That way if demand causes unbalance, the circuit controlled inserters can rebalance without interfering with the other parts of the process.

The one doubt I have is whether going chest-belt-chest could reduce throughput. I am not sure if the belt-to-chest stack inserter would be able to maintain the same throughput as the earlier train-chest-belt section.
Belt to chest are much slower.

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Re: Autonomous Railcar (Un)loader Tile Blueprint

Post by zOldBulldog »

mrvn wrote:
Belt to chest are much slower.
I feared that.

Perhaps something is possible using a section of rail and stationary cargo wagon. As in: train-stack inserters-stationary wagon(s)-unload to belts.

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Re: Autonomous Railcar (Un)loader Tile Blueprint

Post by mrvn »

You can load from train to car to train. By offsetting the trains you can build a big balancer circuit using inserters and train cars as splitters and cars as belts.

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