Placing rail entities in the wrong direction

[BenSeidel]

At the moment, when you go to place a train stop or signal, if the track is marked as one-direction you are unable to place the item on the opposite side of the track (unless you have robots). This can be quite frustrating as you have to go and find the location where the train "input" has to be put, and place it. Likewise, you can also mine up a piece of connecting railway so the track becomes bidirectional again.

If instead of just out-right denying you the ability to build the entities it changed the directional markers from yellow to red?

rail direction.jpg (68.33 KiB) Viewed 1349 times

If that is too radical, can we have an option to disable the behaviour so we can build our rail network in the order that is most convenient?
Thanks.

[Engimage]

You can always place a signal on the opposite side of existing signal to make the track bidirectional. If that signal is far place one nearby and then again you will be able to place one on the opposite side.
I find this game feature really convinient as gives you proper understanding of what did you do to your tracks with signals helping you find the source of improper behaviour.
Giving you ability to place items no matter what will only let you screw up things even more.

[BenSeidel]

Yes, I am aware of the various ways to get the rail to become bidirectional. It's still a pain in the neck to have to stop trying to build what you are trying to build to try to trick the game into allowing me to build the items I want to build. Also, it really doesn't stop you from building something that doesn't work, as most of the issues with incorrect rail systems is due to a missing signal, somewhere in a very long line of track.

Anyway, it's the mechanic in Factorio that I hate the most.

[ssilk]

IMHO you're doing something wrong. I never have such problems.

[BenSeidel]

Yeah, I'm probably building my rail network in a bizzaro way. It really only affects me when I run out of signals, and am unable to place the complete intersection/branch so I can't keep building the rest of it because it's telling me that I'm missing a signal. But it's still annoying and I would prefer to be able to turn it off.