Rails could track how often they're used

[nljr]

It would be really nice to have a record of how much traffic went down a particular rail.

Turrets already track how many things they killed, and assemblers track how many things they've made.

Wouldn't it be awesome if tracks tracked how many locomotives have passed?

[Tekky]

It may already be possible to implement such a counter using the circuit network. However, I'm afraid that such a counter would not be reliable, because, if a train leaves a block in one tick and another train enters that block in the same tick, the circuit network attached to the track signals will not detect any change.

However, if this suggestion of mine were implemented, then it would certainly be possible for the circuit network to reliably detect this, by reading the Train IDs in a certain block and incrementing a counter whenever a change in Train ID is detected.

[Pi-C]

Wouldn't it be awesome if tracks tracked how many locomotives have passed?

Do you really mean "how many locomotives have passed" or rather "how many times did some locomotive pass"? I always find numbers like these irritating.

One example from real life: The company responsible for public traffic in our town regularly publishes statistics like this: "This year, 2.4 million people have used our buses. That's about 150.000 more than in the previous year." Given that only about 60.000 people live here, and that many of these use their private car or ride their bicycle, such numbers are just ludicrous. What they really mean is, they can account for 2.4 million individual tickets that have been used.

[nljr]

Do you really mean "how many locomotives have passed" or rather "how many times did some locomotive pass"? I always find numbers like these irritating.

Absolutely. What I care about is traffic, which means every pass by any locomotive should count.

Your public transit organization also cares about traffic, in the specific sense of passenger traffic.