electric trains

[hooiberg]

And when you walk across the rails, you get zapped!

[Koub]

[Koub] Merged into older topic with same subject.

[Aeternus]

I tried making this once into a mod - tried replacing the burner engine of the train with an electrical one and the fuel buffers with a capacitor charge (so that a train could run over unpowered tracks for a while and maybe charge at a convenient destination). All I got for my efforts were a bunch of game crashes. The game did not like a non-burner engine on a train. My guesstimate is that that's just hardcoded somewhere.

I do like the ideas of electrical trains. That could cause a plant to do away with solid fuel entirely.

[bobingabout]

I tried making this once into a mod - tried replacing the burner engine of the train with an electrical one and the fuel buffers with a capacitor charge (so that a train could run over unpowered tracks for a while and maybe charge at a convenient destination). All I got for my efforts were a bunch of game crashes. The game did not like a non-burner engine on a train. My guesstimate is that that's just hardcoded somewhere.

I do like the ideas of electrical trains. That could cause a plant to do away with solid fuel entirely.

They have since changed the data stage of the locomotive to specifically have a burner= tag now instead of an energy_source= tag with type="burner" in the table, meaning you can't even set it as electric anymore.

however, I have seen someone claim to have made an electric trains mod, but can't remember who.

[Skeletpiece]

And when you walk across the rails, you get zapped!

[steinio]

I tried making this once into a mod - tried replacing the burner engine of the train with an electrical one and the fuel buffers with a capacitor charge (so that a train could run over unpowered tracks for a while and maybe charge at a convenient destination). All I got for my efforts were a bunch of game crashes. The game did not like a non-burner engine on a train. My guesstimate is that that's just hardcoded somewhere.

I do like the ideas of electrical trains. That could cause a plant to do away with solid fuel entirely.

They have since changed the data stage of the locomotive to specifically have a burner= tag now instead of an energy_source= tag with type="burner" in the table, meaning you can't even set it as electric anymore.

however, I have seen someone claim to have made an electric trains mod, but can't remember who.

fyi: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Senpais_Trains

[Atlas]

I have a new idea on electric trains. That is that electric trains should not serve as replacement/upgrade of burner trains, but to fill the gap of medium distance transport, which is too long for belts and too short for burner trains.
I have an idea of a electrically powered self-driving cargo wagon that works like this:

1) Powered wagon can only ride on electrified rails. These would be connected to electric network through some kind of interface. These rails could be also used by burner trains, but are a necessity for electric ones.
2) Powered wagons would accelerate very quickly, but have 50 km/h top speed (blue belt goes at 20 km/h).
3) Powered wagons would be able to go in both directions, which would make terminus stations more useful. I'll get to the "Why" of this later.
4) Otherwise they would behave like standard trains.
(This could also work with electric locomotives)

The "Why" of this:
The main advantage of powered wagons is, that they are compact and so are their stations (mostly terminus i believe). Their slow speed and (probably) expensive recipe would make them inferior to burner trains on long distances,while their size and required infrastructure would make them inferior to belts on very short distances. However they would reign supreme on medium distances, such as transporting ore from nearby mine, stuff between nearby factories or inside a huge factory. I can even imagine a setup, where burner trains drop off resources at the edge of a factory and electric trains bring them inside.

[pleegwat]

If you add overhead electric wires as something that has to be placed separately, that adds a whole new array of ways things can deadlock if part of your intersections turns out to not be electrified properly.

[Atlas]

If you add overhead electric wires as something that has to be placed separately, that adds a whole new array of ways things can deadlock if part of your intersections turns out to not be electrified properly.

I actually imagined something like a third rail. It's easily visible and the graphics could be similar to standard rails.

[Peppow]

Just use the normal rails! For an elective Train to work you need to add a contact wire. could even use exsisting graphics from powerpoles..
If the train drives out of an electified rail its just rolls until its momentum is gone.
In addition, electic trains usually have a much higher maximum speed..

[MalcolmCooks]

I think the next step in the evolution of electric locomotives would be big accumulator packs.
Maybe design a locomotive without "ordinary" fuel and use a large accumulator instead.
So without the need to modify all the train tracks the Devs might think about it.
(there are also opportunities to design speedloaders and maybe a research to increase accu capacity)

Maybe this would be the best way to implement electric trains
I like this a lot better for a few reasons
- Electric and burner trains can run on the same tracks
- You don't need to spend time and resources upgrading your rail network - just add charging facilities at stations. This could be as simple as ensuring that a power pole covers the loco at a train stop, or a special charging port placed next to the track
- it would look pretty cool. Imagine having a locomotive with a row of visible accumulators
- I think it fits with the slightly "out-there" theme that most technology in Factorio takes; in the sense that, the most logical way for Factorioguy, stuck on an alien planet and having to build up a technology base from scratch, is not the same logical path that technology on earth follows. I think it makes sense that since you already have accumulators, you would just stick a few into a locomotive to make an electric locomotive, instead of drawing power from the network directly. Also, I think if we had good accumulators on Earth this would probably turn out to be the more resource-efficient way to run electric trains.

[steinio]

It would be enough if we can Insert a fusion generator in the loco grid.

[bobingabout]

To be honest, I don't know why you'd need electrified rails (3rd rail, or overhead wires) anyway, the way power distribution works with everything else, just run substations down your tracks, and let trains take power from the grid that way.

and when you don't have power coverage, the train just stops actively moving, and just coasts until it's in the power grid again.

And accumulator wagons could be charged while in this grid too... in fact given how prevalent entities that store power are (Roboport stores power for example) the locomotive probably should have a limited battery to get past small unpowered areas.

[mp0011]

Separate tracks are good for pathfinding I think...

Electric trains will path through electrified tracks, skipping the rest.
With substations, it will need to somehow take them into account while pathfinding..

[xana]

TL;DR

To be able to develop the train and the car in electric

What ?

Coal becomes a rather useless resource when we unblock the nuclear reactor, parel for batteries. Being able to have the vehclue and the electric train is an evolution as well as being able to transport in the vagon of the charged or empty batteries.

Why ?

coal machines no longer exist for a while and we start to create electrical votes in the real world so why not. And then in the game we can change the furnaces is the robotic arms that consume coal and then evolve it consumes electrical energy.

ps: I use google translation for you speak

[Deadlock989]

Coal is not "useless". Plastic is very important: no coal, no plastic. And there's coal liquefaction if your map is low on oil.

Electric trains would be very nice, but you'd want electrified track, sounds UPS-unfriendly to me.

Battery packs that have to be charged - just another thing to swap in and out of vehicles every time you place them, same as coal or solid fuel or nuclear fuel. Pretty sure there are mods for that. Again, it's nice, but it doesn't really change things, you're still having to supply the car with another object that you carry around, except now you can't even knock down a tree for fuel or gather some local coal when you're stranded 10km from base.

[bobingabout]

Electric trains would be very nice, but you'd want electrified track, sounds UPS-unfriendly to me.

I had a long conversation with Rseding in the source access channel on Discord.

Electric vehicles is not going to happen, and if someone wrote a patch to do it, likely wouldn't get approved either. why?

There are 3 possible ways to do electric trains (we didn't talk about cars)
1. Power poles affect trains.
Unlike an entity that only needs to scan for a grid when it it placed, or an electric pole is placed near it, a locomotive constantly moves, so would need to rescan for an electric grid every time it moved, that means every tick it is in motion. I am told this is also not a cheap procedure, it doesn't really effect the game when you manually place entities every now and then, even when building large blueprints you might get a single update take two ticks instead of one, but if you had trains doing it constantly, it would kill UPS.

2. Electrified Rail.
Implemented likely with some entity that interfaces to the rails rather than a pole, for reasons similarly mentioned above... it would add too much "overhead" (read memory usage) to implement. we didn't go into too much details, but still, the main reason rail types were removed so that there is only one type of rail that all trains use was done on purpose to remove overhead, and adding more back in for electric rails isn't going to happen.

3. Accumulator trains and charging stations.
The train has an internal battery, perhaps accumulator wagons to make the battery last longer, and a charging station (or just charge at the station). When the train leaves the station it becomes dependant on it's charge, and in theory there will be no way to charge the train if it doesn't make it into a station (I guess you could build a station on the line next to a locomotive and power it to recharge it)


If any electric train were implemented, it would likely be the 3rd option, however... for this kind of implementation that could be done through scripting anyway, would there be much of a point? Also this was mostly about the possibility of allowing modders to use the custom entity for it, I don't think there's any plan to add this to the base game at all even if it was implemented in code.

[dood]

If any electric train were implemented, it would likely be the 3rd option, however... for this kind of implementation that could be done through scripting anyway, would there be much of a point?

If all idle vehicles would gain charge while idle under a power pole and if they haven't started burning things yet, refueling would be so trivial, you could do it on every station so refueling stations are no longer necessary, trains could go directly from A to B and you could just plop down your car under a power pole and drive away without having to pick up or carry some coal or wood.

Fuel would be the option to super charge vehicles with bonus acceleration for a little more inconvenience.

[orzelek]

And what about:
4. Vehicle can consume power provided by it's equipment grid?

[dood]

And what about:
4. Vehicle can consume power provided by it's equipment grid?

Vehicle equipment grids are not a vanilla thing and it probably never will be, seeing how it was added specifically to be available for modders quite some time ago.
If they wanted it to be vanilla, by now, it would be. So that kind of thing would be something for modders to worry about.