driving car on the tracks

[nyspace1]

I would love there to be a mod that allows the car to be allied with any train tracks that are on the ground and drive on them. Like pressing a button and then the car is aligned with the tracks and then press it again and it becomes a regular car again. This might be a good idea when going long distances in the car to an area you have made tracks to with out having to worry about running into anything.

[Koub]

Except a train

[Supercheese]

That's a neat idea, but it sure could be dangerous: I foresee the chance you'd either crash into another train on the tracks, or another train would plow into you!

[mngrif]

It all depends on how big the explosion is when you faceplant in to an oncoming locomotive.

This is not unprecedented

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road-rail_vehicle

[ssilk]

I think there is already such a mod?! Maybe it is a 0.12 mod...

[aubergine18]

There's shuttle train mod: https://mods.factorio.com/mods/simwir/ShuttleTrain

And a mod to put vehicles on trains: https://mods.factorio.com/mods/Superche ... le%20Wagon

And early game rail: https://mods.factorio.com/mods/goldsword44/JunkTrain

But couldn't find anything yet that allows vehicle to snap to rails.

[steinio]

Vehicle Snap aligns the car horizontal or vertical to the grid: https://mods.factorio.com/mods/Zaflis/VehicleSnap

What do you want to achieve with the rails? More speed? Just drive a straight route?
Edit: I read your intro but don't see the surplus as just using a train instead.

Greetings steinio

[nyspace1]

Vehicle Snap aligns the car horizontal or vertical to the grid: https://mods.factorio.com/mods/Zaflis/VehicleSnap

What do you want to achieve with the rails? More speed? Just drive a straight route?
Edit: I read your intro but don't see the surplus as just using a train instead.

Greetings steinio

Trains are great to have but unless you are at a station and you want to easily go somewhere by train tracks then you have to plop down another train on the tracks and then go to the location. If you could say just be in your car (and keep the inventory in your car with you) then you can easily just take the rails to the location that you need to go. I guess I really just do not like having keep a train engine, coal, and maybe a cargo wagon in my pocket when I want to go to a distant train station when ever I need to. I guess I am really lazy. Thank you for the link to the thread but that is something that I am just not interested in.

[Anson]

there is a mod to follow roads automatically :
[MOD 0.12.x] Pavement Drive Assist
too bad that there have been no updates for 0.13 or 0.14 :-(

without pavement, that mod works similar to the abovementioned mod that aligns the car to 1/64 of a full circle, thus allowing to easily drive parallel to tracks. and when there is pavement (stone or concrete roads), it automagically turns the car to follow that road, no matter whether straight or soft or even medium curves. just hold down W or S and the car does the rest.
in version 0.12 there were no hotkeys yet, and thus you had to move the car yourself with W or S, but with 0.14 it should now even be possible to add hotkeys to that mod and thus only need to push the hotkey once to toggle on/off auto-driving (until the road ends or you crash into another obstacle :-).

I don't make mods (yet?), but a first look at that mod shows that it shouldn't be too complicated ...

with a mod like that, i could very well imagine FARL laying tracks, and automatically building a road (4 tiles wide) between the rails of a double-track. it also should be possible to build a track on top of concrete and thus enable a car to drive on the tracks (no idea how difficult it would be to check for rails instead of stone/concrete floor).

left: road between rails; right: track on top of road (concrete)

rail+road.PNG (357.51 KiB) Viewed 3777 times

[steinio]

VehicleSnap could help: https://mods.factorio.com/mods/Zaflis/VehicleSnap

Greetings steinio