Factorio Forums

With the ability to turn stations on and off, it would be nice to specify if the train should skip a disabled station or wait at its current station for the next station to be enabled.

Adding this as one more option in the Wait Condition list seems like the simplest place to add this in.

Ex:

Wait:
5 Seconds of Inactivity
AND Next Station Enabled

I just came here to suggest this, but let me instead support it.

I think the reason this isn't a thing is that there are circuit conditions to enable stations and circuit conditions to allow trains to go, so there's a puzzle involved in making the train not go when the next station is closed

If you have a "Waiting"-Station and the next shedule of your train is one or even multiple train Stations with the same name with enable and disable conditions, the train will stay at the "Waiting"-Station till the next Station is enabled.

I make this with my Fuel train. I have about 20 Stations on the map calling "Train Supply" and one Station called "Train Power". So i load Rocketfuel at Train Power and the train goes automatically to all enabled "Supply Stations" and comes back to "Train Power". There it is waiting till a Station gets enabled (<10 Rocket Fuel)

Monster wrote:If you have a "Waiting"-Station and the next shedule of your train is one or even multiple train Stations with the same name with enable and disable conditions, the train will stay at the "Waiting"-Station till the next Station is enabled.

I make this with my Fuel train. I have about 20 Stations on the map calling "Train Supply" and one Station called "Train Power". So i load Rocketfuel at Train Power and the train goes automatically to all enabled "Supply Stations" and comes back to "Train Power". There it is waiting till a Station gets enabled (<10 Rocket Fuel)

The problem is, I have (to make it simple) 3 stations and 2 trains.

Station1: Pickup Gears
Station2: Dropoff Gears (I actually have several named the same name, for any base that needs gears except Science)
Station3: Dropoff for Red Science

Train1: Goes between PIckup Gears and Dropoff Gears.
Train2: Goes between PIckup Gears, pickup Copper, and Dropoff Green Science.

Frequently, no stations need gears, so the "Gears" train ends up chilling in the "Pickup Gears" station, blocking it from use by the Science train. My solution to this was to add a 4th station:

Station4: Holding

This station would allow a train to just sit in it, waiting for its next station to become enabled. However, what happens is the Gear train goes to it, waits for whatever condition I set to become true (All I can really do here is wait for a given time to pass) and then it goes right back to the Pickup Gears station. It goes back and forth over and over, wasting coal and (if I had a lot of trains doing similar) clogging up my rail lines.

Now, you can say I should treat Science the same as everything else, and you may even be right. But I didn't. I saw that Science was a special case and decided to treat it differently. The game won't let me though for no reason other than the option isn't available. It's not that I'm doing anything *wrong* per se, it's that what I want to do just isn't possible given the current train wait states.

I'll probably just redesign my network in some goofy way (Like, have a "Pickup gears for science" station that gets supplied by the Gears train, which just makes yet another buffer for gears) to get around this, so it's not the worst thing evar or anything.

I'd just like it.

Add a red wire to your power network and put a signal on the red wire when a station needs gears. Then at the gear producing station you connect the red wire to the trains stop with send signal to train and add a wait "condition gears > 0" to the train schedule.

I have red/green wires across all of my map and use red to signal demand of something and green to signal availability of something.

Add a naughty-box stop that's always enabled but is behind enough pathfinder penalties (e.g. stops named "low-priority") that it's picked only if all others are closed.

mrvn wrote:Add a red wire to your power network and put a signal on the red wire when a station needs gears. Then at the gear producing station you connect the red wire to the trains stop with send signal to train and add a wait "condition gears > 0" to the train schedule.

I'm not sure how this will help. Won't it still keep my gear train at the gear pickup station when there are no gear dropoff stations requesting gears? In fact, it seems to me that this is just another way to do what I'm already doing by enabling and disabling stations.

quyxkh wrote:Add a naughty-box stop that's always enabled but is behind enough pathfinder penalties (e.g. stops named "low-priority") that it's picked only if all others are closed.

My problem isn't that the trains' going to the "waiting" station too often, or at all really. It's that it won't stay there. It also won't stay at this "naughty-box" station as there's no way for it to know it shouldn't leave yet.

Place a regular signal in front of your holding station, instead of telling the train to go to the next station let the regular signal unlock with circuits when the train can go, this will deny the train a path until you want it to go, stopping the waste of fuel another trick is using regular signals inside some train stops as train detectors (they go red while there's a train in the station and you can read that to a circuit network instead of relying on reading train details from the trainstop)

JohnyDL wrote:Place a regular signal in front of your holding station, instead of telling the train to go to the next station let the regular signal unlock with circuits when the train can go, this will deny the train a path until you want it to go, stopping the waste of fuel another trick is using regular signals inside some train stops as train detectors (they go red while there's a train in the station and you can read that to a circuit network instead of relying on reading train details from the trainstop)

Hmmm I never thought about setting a train signal due to circuits. I'll look into this. Though I'm not super jazzed about running circuit wires all over my railworld, I'll admit.

Don't you use big power poles in your rails? Most of the time the systems don't need separate networks just separate signal types you'll find a way to make it work

5thHorseman wrote:

mrvn wrote:Add a red wire to your power network and put a signal on the red wire when a station needs gears. Then at the gear producing station you connect the red wire to the trains stop with send signal to train and add a wait "condition gears > 0" to the train schedule.

I'm not sure how this will help. Won't it still keep my gear train at the gear pickup station when there are no gear dropoff stations requesting gears? In fact, it seems to me that this is just another way to do what I'm already doing by enabling and disabling stations.

quyxkh wrote:Add a naughty-box stop that's always enabled but is behind enough pathfinder penalties (e.g. stops named "low-priority") that it's picked only if all others are closed.

My problem isn't that the trains' going to the "waiting" station too often, or at all really. It's that it won't stay there. It also won't stay at this "naughty-box" station as there's no way for it to know it shouldn't leave yet.

I thought you wanted the train to stay. The problem with disabling stations is that if you have "producer", "consumer", "refuel" and disable the "consumer" (or "producer") then the train will still drive from "producer" to "refuel" all the time for no gain. At whatever station you want the train to stay use the signal to make it only go when you want it to go.

Could this condition be implemented please? This seems very easy to do and gives a massive boost to train networks abilities, which developers seems not realize. This simple change would pretty much give a basic level LTN.

Thank you.

Rationale:
Current enable/disable station and multiple stations with the same name functionality is practically useless to manage trains without ability to make your train wait if your provider station becomes disabled. All 'ideas' above to block the train signal are not solutions at all. If you block at the wait signal but a different station with the same name becomes available at different location the train can not repath there because it is committed to a certain station already. On the other hand if you move that train signal too far away from the station then you have a problem of transmitting the signal over the distance.

So ye, several months later and I'm here with exactly the same problem.
I don't want to use mods in my current game, so LTN is no real option.
And like the User before said, all the above suggested "solutions" are only workarounds and still have it's limitations.

So I'm really really also for a simple new condition like "Wait until next/one of the next stations are active" or something like that.
I'm not able to see any "vanilla" solution that make this work without any use of mods. But I might be wrong, if someone can show me how, I would really appreciate it!

regards

Counter suggestion:
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=90505 is [Train] New wait condition to compliment v1.1 — condition to not skip stations

Very related:
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=89618 Trains need to skip unload stations when empty

Checkmate.

This will finally fix this, Cheerio!