ACME special delivery

[Amarula]

I thought I would share a couple of the things I have done to make working with trains easier.

• I have a personal transport train that I use to get around my base. I have a blueprint that drops down a siding (so my personal transport doesn't block regular trains using that route). I name the siding based on where I put it, like kovarex east, or rocket silo 4. I have too many (500+++) to keep in a schedule, but with the search feature, I just type in the name, pick the siding from the list, for very quick transport anywhere in my base. Yes I use and love the new temporary stop feature, but with a big enough base it is way faster to pick the siding from the list than to scroll across the map.
• I have a blueprint that drops down a train stop called "Come to mama" and my personal transport is the only train that uses that stop. If for some reason I have jumped on another train, or run around on foot, so I am not near my transport, I drop the blueprint, click on the stop, open my train schedule, and call my transport to come pick me up. Super easy, hardest part is remembering to pick up the stop when I am done.
• As my factory grew (the factory must grow!), I soon could no longer carry enough material with me. So I created a supplemental train to deliver belts, inserters, factories, miners, furnaces, power poles.... I thought about calling it FedEx, but decided that ACME had a much better mad scientist flavour (thank you Wile Coyote and RoadRunner!)
  I have a blueprint that drops down a siding with a train stop named Acme. I click on the stop, and select the train waiting at Acme Home, and summon it to deliver the extra materials I need. I use waiting for fluid count > 0 so the train waits at home until I summon it, and then waits at Acme until I am done. Again the hardest part is remembering to remove the stop when I am done.
  The siding has room for one train with one cargo wagon.
• And after not too long, a single Acme train wasn't enough. So now I have:
  1. Acme is still my go-to delivery service with a little bit of everything.
  2. Track-me carries more rails, and belts, and landfill. In the near future it will likely have rails removed to make more room for belts, at which time it would likely be renamed to Belt-me.
  3. Yukon Ho! (thank you Bill Waterson for Calvin and Hobbes!) carries more rails, and signals, and power poles because Track-me doesn't have enough rails, and doesn't have the other things I need to extend my rail network.
  4. Beam me up Scottie! (thank you Star Trek) carries beacons and modules.
  5. Domo arigato Mr Roboto (thank you Styx) carries robots, roboports, and logistic chests.
  6. Duke Nuke'em carries nuclear reactors, heat pipes, heat exchangers, offshore pumps.
  7. Steamboat Annie carries steam turbines (because my standard nuclear plant blueprint has 288 turbines and there wasn't enough room in Duke Nuke'em). I tried adding a second wagon but it seemed too heavy and too slow, and didn't fit in the Acme siding without blocking the tracks.
  8. Roomba is the newest addition: he picks up lumber, and stone, and coal - all the detritus of construction, and carries it away so I don't have to.
  9. Coming soon: Black Gold, for setting up new oil fields with pipes, tanks, pumps and pumpjacks, and There's gold in them thar hills, with miners and belts, for setting up new orefields.
  So now when I open the Acme stop, I select the acme train that has what I need. Often I summon one, and once it arrives, I summon another, which will be on its way while I am grabbing and using the materials from the first one. Each has its own home base where it reloads and waits until I need it again.
  Oh and if you are wondering how I name the train, I don't really name the train, I name the home stop for the train, so when I look at the list of trains that have Acme in the schedule, I see which one it is by the name of the home stop in the schedule.

Many thanks to the devs for creating this amazing game, and to the many players who have shared ideas, and helped me get this far.

[_Shin_]

It's always nice to see how people solve problems in their own way. There is certainly no wrong way to do it; especially in Factorio.

That being said. I think you are over complicating things in this instance.

What you're calling an ACME train, is often/usually referred to as a engineering train. Sometimes a construction train.

If you have a train loaded near your Make Everything/Mall/Warehouse, that loads plenty of items onto it you just have to drop down a little spur off the main rail, then plop down a station and call the train to it. I'll usually have no way for it to leave, or set an impossible condition for it to leave. Build your outpost or whatever, then finish the track so it can continue and send it back to base. Being done, pull up your station and move on.

I do create Passenger rails, and fuel trains, but on my current 2.5k base there are 7 fuel drops, 1 loading. I could certainly have more, one for every build I have, but there is really little need. Having fuel at your intermediate products will usually suffice. As such:

Screenshot 2020-04-13 19.08.56.png (1.05 MiB) Viewed 3620 times

And for i getting there, it's moved between robo networks like this:

Screenshot 2020-04-13 19.13.00.png (56 KiB) Viewed 3620 times

[Amarula]

That being said. I think you are over complicating things in this instance.

Yes but it is complicated in a very fun way

If you have a train loaded near your Make Everything/Mall/Warehouse, that loads plenty of items onto it

Ah but how do you define plenty of items? My base is designed around tiny trains (one locomotive, one cargo/fluid wagon), and one wagon just can't hold enough of everything I want to build. For example, my belt/landfill train has 20 stacks of each, and often I have to send it back to reload. My steam turbine train has 30 stacks of steam turbines. Also, I don't need every type of item for every expansion. For example, I don't need chem plants if I am building a nuclear power sector, nor do I need steam turbines to put miners down on a new ore field.

I am very interested in how you manage to fuel your trains. (Nice work on passing items back and forth between robo networks btw!) For a small set of fuel drops to work, every train has to pass through those fuel drops. How does that work? I tried using dedicated fuel loading sectors, but when every train you have has to be fueled, so is competing with every other train to get to the fuel sector, the congestion was insane. And having every train go from source to destination to fuel sector adds a huge overhead in unnecessary trips to the fuel sector.

After running into problem after problem, I eventually settled on my current philosophy, which is, one train for one purpose. So if circuits need iron, there is an iron train (or more than one), that takes iron to the circuit sector. It doesn't take anything else, there are separate trains for copper; it doesn't go anywhere else, the grenades sector has its own dedicated iron trains. And every train has its own allocated space to load/unload, and to wait its turn to load/unload if needed, so there is never a time when a train has no where to wait and blocks other trains from getting where they need to go.

Which also leads into my approach to acme trains; each acme train has a specific purpose, and I only call it when I need it.

Of course the entire approach of using tiny trains is a choice that is very different from many megabases; my tiny trains work with relatively tiny sectors, and I replicate the sectors as needed to meet a given demand. The sectors are located in close proximity so each tiny train has a very short path, so I don't get any noticeable UPS hit from path finding.

Thanks for sharing your approach!

[_Shin_]

Usually I have one stacker for each 'build' each build will make one thing, IE Modules, or Solar Panels. My most recent base I decided to try something a little different, but it worked quite well. At least for lower volume items. Anyway, the Pic first:

Screenshot 2020-04-15 21.44.29.png (113.47 KiB) Viewed 3534 times

On the bottom right hand corner is my Passenger, Trash, and Fuel stops. As you can see the bot networks are seperate. It will drop about 2 cargo wagons of fuel into passive provider chests, then leave. The station will then remain closed until the number of available fuel lower limit is reached. Until then the bots bring fuel to requester chests, which are then moved to the next bot network in a provider chest, as pictured in my original post. This continues, moving up and out, spreading over the other networks. I'll usually limit the providers to 5 stacks so there isn't too much fuel just sitting around. When one is put into a train, the bots grab another from the provider. It gets refilled starting the process over again.

I never put fuel in outposts, (ore mining), on this map I'm smelting on site, so most every static build needs fuel, but no outposts which may, or will run out and be moved/replaced. As you can see from the pic things are not perfect, I added things and moved the fuel/passenger stop and never fixed the location to be outside of the speed modules build properly, but it works and has run without a hicup at 2.5kpm for over 100 hours with almost 42k satellites launched. (it ran with a few hickups for quite some time before that).

Anyway you get it done is the right way imho. Some may call my way overly complicated. It is just what makes sense to me.

[Amarula]

Ah very good: one train stop delivers the fuel, then the fuel is shared across bot networks so each build (what I call a sector) has fuel trains that stop there. That makes perfect sense to me. No fuel for outposts, same here, the train gets fuel when it delivers from the outpost.

42K satellites launched, very nice! I just hit 6K, so I have quite a ways to go.

[JimBarracus]

I have a personal train with 6 stations for certain areas like the oil refinery or my nuclear power plant.
It has a dedicated station and wont block the track. I only use two lokos, no storage.

The stations are named: !Mall or !Nukular. This way they are always on top of the list.
No need for search.

Using trains with only waggon is a little wastefull.
Trains with 5 waggons and nuclear fuel are fast enough.

[Amarula]

The stations are named: !Mall or !Nukular. This way they are always on top of the list.
No need for search.

Using trains with only waggon is a little wastefull.
Trains with 5 waggons and nuclear fuel are fast enough.

Nice idea to use the exclamation mark to push key stations to the top of the list. I do keep half a dozen stations in my personal train schedule, for the places I typically visit. However, stuff happens - like a tiny smidgen of stone sneaking into an ore field, and making its way through the chain until suddenly a trains stops, waiting to fill, and there is no more stone to fill it up. It certainly is possible to scroll over the map and drop down a temp station to go fix the problem, so it is not required to search, but I find it faster to type in the name of the closest siding and go. Just personal preference...

And yes longer trains are much more efficient; using tiny trains is a conscious design decision in spite of the efficiency penalty.