End Games Train Loading and Unloading

[PCDave]

I use 1 train with multiple stations with the same name to supply ammo turrets, but wondering if its worth doing the same type of thing for ore mining?

So basically for one of mine iron ore smelting stations I have 16 stations each with approximately 4 trains per station.
Sometimes it has stations empty with others queuing to unload.

I've looked at disabling a station when there is not much space left in the unloading chests, but with so many trains not sure this would be a problem?

Also same type of question with collecting ore (to try and make it faster), disabling the station when the chests are not for enough for a full train load. Will the trains just be spending too much time traveling to a station which then gets disabled before it gets there and then travel to the other side of the map for the same thing to happen?

I think I have around 100+ iron ore trains.

Ore smelting 32 stations, 100+ mines (I use just one train per ore patch for all ores)
Copper smelting 32 Stations , 100+ mines.
Coal unloading, 8 Stations, 20 trains.
Stone unloading, 8 Stations, 20 trains.


Any help is much appreciated

[astroshak]

I leave the ore unloading station at the smelter on, always.

Mines, however, I turn on and off based upon how much ore they have available.

I connect all of the chests associated with one cargo wagon together, and put them to the input of a Decider Combinator. If I have ore greater than or equal to what one cargo wagon can hold, then the combinator outputs Green 1.

The outputs of all those Decider Combinators are wired together, to the train station. I enable the station if Green >= however many cargo wagons long the train is.

This works real well for ores, though I’ve yet to get to the stage where I need 100 iron mines.

I’ve not really experimented with using this setup for other stuff much. A train with two stations on its schedule will sit at the enabled one, even with its wait condition satisfied, if the other station is turned off. I’ve also seen trains circling around constantly. I am not sure what the difference was between those two trains, with their similarities of two stations, one on, and one off.

[leadraven]

Ore transporting generates more than 50% or total traffic. That's why I don't have centralized smelters anymore. Everything that require only 1 ore type I produce right near ore patch. Thus I have stations for : Copper plates, Iron plates, Steel plates, Gears, Engines, Bricks.

[PCDave]

I'll think I'll try just the ore mines, probably with just coal or stone to start with.

I have moved my smelting stations away from my base and just feeding the base with lots of long conveyor belts. Though as the base grows, stations need to be moved again. Tinkering with railways and roundabouts are good at first, but end game they do slow everything down. so I use 6 lanes at junctions as the trains don't tend to queue as much.

Oil refinery is probably the worst thing with my base growing as pumps are a pain when feeding several chemical plants, but thinking of having 2 large oil refineries to try and reduce the amount of pumps.

[mrvn]

As said you turn off the stations at the mines, especially when it runs out, instead of at the smelter. That also means the smelter design determines the number of trains you build. Build big there with a big stacker or at least leave lots of space to expand. Consider how many trains you need minimum to have the smelter running full blast and then maybe double that. You will loose time with trains on the way to or from mines so you want another train already at the smelter ready to fill in. And as time goes on the mines get further away and trains take longer. So whatever design you have in mind, double the space yet again.

The other thing, also mentioned sort of, is that the ores are a lot of traffic and smelting them outside you base is a good idea. I think the ideal start is finding a copper/iron ore patch next to a coal patch. Build a smelter right there for just local resources. Then as you expand or the iron ore runs out add stations to unload more iron ore from other mines. When coal runs low add stations to bring in fuel. At the and you have a nice big smelting station outside your base.

For traffic routing purposes it might be a good idea to have a north, south, east, west (or more) smelter when you get big enough.

Best tip I can give you is this: If you have the space then use it. Leave tons of room around your stations, smelters and other satelite factories so you can redesign or expand the stations as needed.

[Olacken]

If you are expending your ore oupost in multiple direction use diferent station name for every direction to prevent train from repathing to the oposite of the map

[PCDave]

Having robots to build land now is a god send!
I tend just to expand my base and use electric furnaces so I can get extra plates for free. Unfortunately this does cause expanding my base slow as it does take a while for the robots to collect resources to build. They don't like going over big patches of water either and tend to go back and recharge and get stuck in an endless loop.


That's a good idea Olacken, Just started to change my coal over to the new system. Think I will have to definitely do that for iron and copper once I've moved the unloading stations further away from my base!

[SyncViews]

I never got multiple mines (or high volume intermediate products) with a shared name to work as well as dedicated routes. More trains than are needed will try and head towards one mine then cause extra congestion when they all decide to head to the next one. Without a "only X inbound trains allowed" setting on a station, I don't see a way to control it well enough compared to just having the right number of trains set to each route.

Plus anything that can cause a train to re-path while travelling can cause it to try and turn around in unexpected places you then have to be really careful about. Lower volume routes with one train will work fine.

As for depleted mines, my general rule is every station with a load/unload all style condition must have a platform/waiting space per train on the route, so it can never back up enough to break stuff. Then when depleted I'll have the X trains parked at the mine ready for easy reassignment to my next thing, if I want to dismantle the mine/station first, I send them to a "spare trains" station / waiting yard.

For very large stations, where for throughput purposes you want multiple signal blocks heading towards platforms/stations (I think at one point I had a central furnace setup with something like almost one arrival/departure of a 10 or so wagon train per second or two) some clever circuit stuff can be done with "waypoint" stations and signals to keep them waiting until there is a free platform to go to (else they can pile up on a red signal at the "furthest one"). But mostly now I found a decentralized network with multiple smaller sites for a given intermediate better avoiding this and keeping routes shorter (less freight miles/tonne-kilometres), and even having nearly dedicated tracks so no complex merging or crossing, but the challenge of putting all the iron, copper or green circuits in one spot is interesting.

so I use 6 lanes at junctions as the trains don't tend to queue as much.

Probably you need to improve the general design, 6 lanes each way on a main line sounds like way too many, I probably have not used even 3 and very rarely 2. But you do need to keep the trains moving, I tend to completely avoid roundabouts as just a source of problems (but a one-way system on a larger scale can work very well), and careful design is needed to stop high volume routes crossing or merging too much. Larger trains tend to work better than lots of small ones, but you have to design all the stations and junctions to accommodate the large trains.

In some special cases careful use of circuits on signals can help (e.g. stop a train pulling out at a junction when you know it will force other trains to stop, and instead wait for a suitably large "gap"), but I didn't try/need to do this routinely, and generally re-routing the traffic to remove the "hotspot" is possible.

Having robots to build land now is a god send!
I tend just to expand my base and use electric furnaces so I can get extra plates for free. Unfortunately this does cause expanding my base slow as it does take a while for the robots to collect resources to build. They don't like going over big patches of water either and tend to go back and recharge and get stuck in an endless loop.

I found once outside the starting area, especially on rail world type maps, having large "construction trains" loaded with everything (using filtered wagon inventory slots) to build a mine/etc. is a fast and easy way. Then have a blueprint for the "construction station" that will put the station+inserters+passive providers down for the construction train to unload along with a roboport in the right spot to be filled direct from a wagon. Player personal robots can easily lay down this initial bit then you have enough storage and proper roboports for the 1000's of items to be placed at a short distance. If using beacons there is gaps between the miners so also useful to have the construction bots ready to "move it over" when the strips are depleted. And a similar one to build over later to load all the spares back into the train.


Also logistics robots if your using them really hate large networks and you can't directly connect two roboports "only for construction bots".

[PCDave]

Only playing about with shared names on my coal supply. Though I've adjusted the fill of the crate for loading, so total coal in chests / chests (-48). Then I -500 away and send to loaders so that they don't all start stopping and not loading very much since they reach the same amount.

I only go to 6 lanes at junctions. Left to turn left, middle straight on and right to turn right. Works out very well and less queuing.

Have to see what happens when a coal mine gets near depletion, though started doing shared names for oil so the storage will delete the storage quicker.

I like the idea of a construction train for remote parts of my base, as it is all connected (just mines that are not), just that any planning goes down, it gets picked up by a base construction robot.

Logistics robots are ok on large bases providing they don't have to travel across open spaces where there are no roboports.

[hale42]

I use a small smelter that produces/loads coal/stone/copper plates/iron plates/steel/uranium and even landfill/bricks/concrete and have bidirectional trains |(1 per patch) that just go back and forth from the smelter and mines. that whole setup is for a section of the map (eg. north area or southeast)

i get around the Q'ing by eather seprating the trains from the rest of the base or have many trains all identical and each goes to every stop but can only go one direction (the trains become a massive buffer)

[mrvn]

There are ways to improve the traffic patterns.

For far away mines a tree structure for the rail network works best. And then you can set the signals with circuits to allow only N trains into each branch, where N is the number of stations on the branch (or 2*N if you want to have a spare). Circuit controlled signals that are red have a high penalty for the train path finding so trains will turn around and find some cheaper station once enough trains have entered each branch.

When approaching a mega base one thing that also helps a lot is longer trains. Like 8-32 wagons. But a single ore patch will take forever to buffer enough ore for a 32 wagon train. And at the end you will always have a huge partial load left over. Also the train stations per ore field would be huge.

So the solution I have is to first have a smelter some way form the base. The smelter can have 4 stations for 8 wagon trains as input with a station for 32 wagon trains as output. So it gets ore from all over the place and concentrates that into extra long trains for shipment into the base. The next step then is to have collection points further out where 2-4 wagon trains bring ore from surrounding ore patches and it gets transfered into 8 wagon trains. Again a concentration from smaller to larger trains. It's all in a tree form. Or maybe a better image is like a river. Little trickles of ore flow from each ore patch and combine into a raging torrent of iron plates.

[SyncViews]

Circuit controlled signals that are red have a high penalty for the train path finding so trains will turn around and find some cheaper station once enough trains have entered each branch.

How many trains you talking about there? I always found anything that causes "will turn around"/"go somewhere else" to be bad, as far too many trains can try and head off somewhere only to mostly want to turn around later or they end up queued at the "furthest point" while something closer they all passed now wants a train and have to bre careful with trains turning around at unexpected places. I tried enabling/disabling ore stations and signals leading to them based on the presence of a train at the station already, and if it had enough ore stored to immediately load a complete train.

Maybe misunderstood what you meant or there is a simple solution nobody thought of in my games?

I considered ways to solve this but that involved things like trying to count the net number of trains going down some branch which got really complicated, and in the end I only ever used such circuit designs if building massive smelting stations in some game (Although certainly not optimal, getting all the ore for well over a 1000 science (including rocket) per minute in marathon (0.15 recipes if I recall) through one smelting station is a challenge).

When approaching a mega base one thing that also helps a lot is longer trains. Like 8-32 wagons. But a single ore patch will take forever to buffer enough ore for a 32 wagon train. And at the end you will always have a huge partial load left over. Also the train stations per ore field would be huge.

Worth mentioning that map settings have a huge impact. If you have large pieces of rich ore, large trains to each individual mine is simple and works well, and if each 30 wagon train gets stuck at the station in the end with a half load, but it did say a 100 trips to get there over many hours of play, then not really a big deal and it can sit there until build a new mine. Also after the early game phase, how long it takes to buffer/load a train is a lot less of an issue, total throughput is, which as you say, bigger trains do a lot more easily.

Sometimes will even build the furnaces at the mine if have very rich ore. Basically halves the train traffic which is a great win, and blueprints, construction bots, and a special logistics train mean once figured it out, can build and tear them down with very minimal player effort.

If however have far more small mines that will deplete quickly, I found shorter local trains of 6-10 wagons (depending on game, stick to one size is best. Similar to you described) better (usually to a local furnace, or things like coal to a "transfer station") to work well. As essentially an entirely separate track, kinda like real world industry often used narrow-gauge as easier and cheaper than standard/wider gauges. Smaller stations to build/destroy at each mine, can be less careful with loops on smaller trains to not gridlock themselves, etc.


At big base sizes (and especially with expensive recipes, and even more so the old electronic circuits), I'll move at least steel (5 iron per steel normal, 10 expensive), gears (2 or 4 iron) and electronic-circuits (1.5 copper plus 1 iron, or 4 copper plus 2 iron) out to near the furnaces and drop the large furnace trains. Intermediate products like these drastically reduce the number of long distance trains needed, and you need lots of them so needing to expand production at some point is usual anyway.
Electronic-circuits especially are a huge win to reduce mainline train traffic, not only does 1 circuit need multiple inputs in both recipe modes, they stack to 200 while plates only stack to 100, so every train of circuits carries twice as much. So that is 5 times less trains in normal and 12 times less trains in expensive/marathon.