Factorio Forums

Found this video today, watched it, and thought "Wow, imagine if I could do that in Factorio..."
I guess this would be the most compact way to store long trains, if there were bridge rails. And as far as I can tell, this would require a maximum of five signals to operate (obviously there would be more if you wanted to store multiple trains inside the spiral). Unfortunatley, I don't believe this would work with the current way that signals and train interact.

This is somehow hypnotic

In model railroads I've mostly seen spirals being used to change elevation. Storage is usually done with more or less straight shadow stations. It's much easier to add/remove a train from a straight track.


The most compact trains storage in a game is the OTTD depot. Compressing countless 50 tile long trains into one tile. It's almost like an train de-assembler that puts the train in a storage chest.

Optera wrote:In model railroads I've mostly seen spirals being used to change elevation. Storage is usually done with more or less straight shadow stations. It's much easier to add/remove a train from a straight track.


The most compact trains storage in a game is the OTTD depot. Compressing countless 50 tile long trains into one tile. It's almost like an train de-assembler that puts the train in a storage chest.

That is.... beautiful. I used to be in to model trains, but ended up drifting away as I got a bit older. I'd love to start up again, but money is tight right now. I still actually have my Lionel New York Central Flyer set, it's an O27 gauge, from about 1993. Haven't taken it back out of the box in quite some years though, and never actually had a respectable setup with any model train. I wasn't quite old enough to build dioramas for my setups. My grandmother's neighbor has his entire back yard built as basically a city, with trains going to and from different stations, picking things up and dropping them off. All with buildings, people, cars, sound effects, the whole nine yards. As a kid I was enthralled by this, and would go there every chance I got just to watch it all moving. I forget what gauge he has, but I know it is a larger gauge than O27, as the engines were usually a foot or two long. The coolest part I remember Is that he could call any train in to his garage, which was essentially a repair depot for all his engines. No room for vehicles in there, just tracks and engines everywhere

Imagine if Factorio had a varied height landscape, things like this would come in super handy (although maybe not to the extremes we see here). I suppose I was wrong with saying "the most compact storage available for long trains", but i still think it would be quite cool to see a train in factorio go through one of these spirals. I've always wanted to build large train yards in Factorio, just to store trains in waiting. In the beginning I was building massive yards and filling them with trains; But the only reason they actually filled is because of signalling problems along my lines. I still build massive train yards as a waiting queue, but they hardly ever have more than 2 trains in them now, as I know how to properly signal my tracks. Plus I rarely have need for that many resources, I've never attempted a Mega-Factory, I go for efficiency above all else. I just think those large yards look so cool.

As for OpenTTD, I've watched some videos on YouTube concerning it, and it looks like a lot of fun. How exactly does a depot work though? From the looks of it, it is just a small building that trains can drive into. How could a small building like that store a 50 tile long train? I noticed OTTD is available for Linux, so maybe I'll download it and try my hand.

Also, Koub, I too find this quite mesmerizing. I especially love the effect of the inner track seemingly moving faster than the more outward track, even though they really aren't.

komrade_toast wrote: That is.... beautiful. I used to be in to model trains, but ended up drifting away as I got a bit older. I'd love to start up again, but money is tight right now. I still actually have my Lionel New York Central Flyer set, it's an O27 gauge, from about 1993. Haven't taken it back out of the box in quite some years though, and never actually had a respectable setup with any model train. I wasn't quite old enough to build dioramas for my setups. My grandmother's neighbor has his entire back yard built as basically a city, with trains going to and from different stations, picking things up and dropping them off. All with buildings, people, cars, sound effects, the whole nine yards. As a kid I was enthralled by this, and would go there every chance I got just to watch it all moving. I forget what gauge he has, but I know it is a larger gauge than O27, as the engines were usually a foot or two long. The coolest part I remember Is that he could call any train in to his garage, which was essentially a repair depot for all his engines. No room for vehicles in there, just tracks and engines everywhere

Imagine if Factorio had a varied height landscape, things like this would come in super handy (although maybe not to the extremes we see here). I suppose I was wrong with saying "the most compact storage available for long trains", but i still think it would be quite cool to see a train in factorio go through one of these spirals. I've always wanted to build large train yards in Factorio, just to store trains in waiting. In the beginning I was building massive yards and filling them with trains; But the only reason they actually filled is because of signalling problems along my lines. I still build massive train yards as a waiting queue, but they hardly ever have more than 2 trains in them now, as I know how to properly signal my tracks. Plus I rarely have need for that many resources, I've never attempted a Mega-Factory, I go for efficiency above all else. I just think those large yards look so cool.

As for OpenTTD, I've watched some videos on YouTube concerning it, and it looks like a lot of fun. How exactly does a depot work though? From the looks of it, it is just a small building that trains can drive into. How could a small building like that store a 50 tile long train? I noticed OTTD is available for Linux, so maybe I'll download it and try my hand.

I've had a small HO setup with a 2 track main line and a 1 track rural line in my room for a while when i was younger.
After having to turn my playing room into a home office though I'm out of space and it's collecting dust in my cabinet....

OTTD to me still is one of the best transport sims.
It's really painful to migrate between versions when you run custom builds though. Unlike Factorio OTTD can only enable new entities on the fly. Adding cargo destinations, signals on bridges and in tunnels to name some, all require being compiled into the game.
My old save covering all of central america and sporting around 2k trains is forever stuck at the old version.

Depots in OTTD work very game-y. They are like bags of (infinite) holding, removing anything inside them from the game world.I usually used fake graphics to build somewhat realistic sized depots around them.

Koub wrote:This is somehow hypnotic

No its just loud

Also known as a Helix.