I didn't misunderstand, maybe I just wasn't clear in what I was trying to say. My mind tends to wander sometimes.Boogieman14 wrote:You misunderstood the questionDasani wrote: You can't have a single track that handles a dozen trains at once efficiently when they have to backtrack both ways over the same rails.
No sir, loop for me. Always. There's not even a question.The 2-headed train option isn't about having a single track to handle all trains. It's essentially about using Terminus stations vs RoRo (Roll on-Roll off) (see http://wiki.openttd.org/Railway_station#Basic_stations for examples). The inbetween network is, with some minor differences, mostly the same. You'd still have two one-directional tracks.
My factory is big. I ship in ore from multiple locations at once to my furnace farm. Current running 200 electric furnaces. The side-tracks off the main-line where these ore trains drop it off are completely full up. I have 4 trains, 4 cargo wagons long each completely loaded with copper sitting in queue all waiting for their turns to drop their loads. So this one side track has 4 of these large trains on it at once and is made (with future expansion in mind) to hold up to 7 of these trains at once. I doubt i'll go up to that capacity but the option is there.
Point is, I can't see how this would work with a two-headed train. I need all those rails to be long and one-way so I can just slink more and more trains on the same track to wait in queue for their turn to drop so I have never ending, never pausing stream of ore coming down into the factory while also keeping the main line with zero obstacles to slow it down.
How could a two-headed train do this efficiently? You'd either have to make new stops for each train so they don't all block each other up or have offshoots on your already offshoot rail line to hold the reserves waiting to unload, so on and so forth. To me, I can't imagine a practical way of making it work that handles the quantities I deal in. I think it could be done for small-scale operations, maybe even for expansions and outposts that would only need a single train visiting it, you could make it work and get away with it. Say you tap a new oil field and only have a single train ferrying that crude back to the base, sure. But for drop-offs there's just no way it would ever work.
So very limited usefulness I think, unless dealing with small scale things.
And again, I think it looks better.
Never liked the idea or the visual for a two-headed train. I think a factory that is not only efficient, but looks good too, is the best way. 
