Building/inserter that can place or pick up trains/wagons

[ribsngibs]

I'm building a big train-based base and thought it would be really cool if I had an automated way of placing locomotives and wagons. Perhaps for a locomotive-placing inserters it could have a schedule just like a locomotive so that the locomotive it places would copy that schedule; similarly the cargo wagon placing inserters would have filters you could set.

Fun constructions I can think of off the top of my head are:

1) Deconstruction train station: when out at an outpost and inventory full of junk, make a train, fill it with junk, send to main base, which empties the cargo and then pulls up the trains themselves. I already do this except every once in a while I have to take a trip back to the main base to manually clean up all the trains.

2) Combinator funsies with making sure there are sufficient trains on a route. For example, I have a train route that has 3 loading stops (electronic circuits, plastic bars, copper plates), and then an unloading stop where it dumps everything off to make advanced circuits. It's hard to know how many trains I need running this loop without timing it out or waiting for a cycle, but it could be fun to do: if buffer chests are less than 80% full and there are no trains waiting in the stacker for unloading, place another train and add it to the route. And: if buffer chests are greater than 90% full and I have 1 or more trains waiting in the stacker waiting to unload, pick up and remove one of the trains.

A setup like that would be fun to use to automate train setups when you have many outposts at varying distances (it would automate adding sufficient trains to maximize throughout and automatically ramp down the trains as your ore or oil deposits dried up, etc.

[ssilk]

The ideas here are quite similar to the "depot" idea (like in OpenTTD).

Some search: search.php?keywords=depot+train&terms=a ... mit=Search