Crash & jam safe train exchange network (RHD LCC trains)

Smart setups of railway stations, intelligent routing, solutions to complex train-routing problems.
Please provide - only if it makes sense of course - a blueprint of your creation.
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Theikkru
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Crash & jam safe train exchange network (RHD LCC trains)

Post by Theikkru »

I've made it a personal mission not to succumb to the most common cause of death in Factorio, and, so far, I've avoided the achievement. I attribute that success to my train network design, which has built-in signals that warn which tracks have moving trains on them. To start, here's the book:

This network has a train for every station, and divides those stations into schedules of one home station and multiple outpost stations. Resources are transported by allowing a pair of trains per schedule—one at home, and one at an outpost—to swap places.
Train routes between stations must be unambiguous, a lot of bitwise math is required to run the rail network, an additional local circuit network is required for all the home stations, and it's a bit of a bear to learn how to use, but once you get the hang of it, it's relatively simple to set up, very safe, completely desync-proof, (as long as you don't muck up the circuitry,) and surprisingly satisfying to watch. Here's a save file demonstrating it in the field:
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Primary.zip
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user guide
1.0 version
Last edited by Theikkru on Sat Oct 11, 2025 3:43 am, edited 13 times in total.
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Theikkru
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Re: Crash & jam safe train exchange network (RHD LCC trains)

Post by Theikkru »

I've updated some circuitry to account for edge cases relating to the train pairs arriving at their destination stations at greatly disparate times, and added an extra example station to the save to demonstrate resource distribution to outposts (as opposed to the default of resource collection from outposts).
Here's a more zoomed out shot:
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Edit: fixed another circuit bug, and cleaned up some wires.
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Re: Crash & jam safe train exchange network (RHD LCC trains)

Post by Theikkru »

Overhauled for Factorio 2.0. I considered trying to extend this from a one-to-many system to a many-to-many system with the new power of interrupts, but ultimately decided that the marginal benefit wasn't worth the added complexity. (Would require significantly more server circuitry, and trying to eliminate race conditions would be a PITA.) The new grouping and scheduling has made train management simpler, though, so I've written a user guide. I've left the old 1.0 version in at the end for posterity's sake, but that demo no longer works out of the box in 2.0 due to the discontinuation of automated station skipping.

P.S. as of version 2.0.23, one of the track pole blueprints is bugged.

Edit: moved some components to improve visibility and resolve an asymmetry, and changed some circuitry to eliminate a desync edge case when trying to disable a station while a train is trying to depart.
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Re: Crash & jam safe train exchange network (RHD LCC trains)

Post by Theikkru »

Updated everything in the first post to account for a few minor changes, some blueprint renaming for ease of use, and to compensate for a change in version 2.0.39 (probably the one addressing bug 118475) that causes trains to interrupt their presence signals when switching between two stops of the same name; said change resulted in thrashing of the launch signals and train desyncs when trying to release trains under previous blueprints.
The bugged track pole blueprint mentioned in the previous post has been fixed as of version 2.0.42.
The rail network in the example save has also progressed somewhat, and showcases the use of multiple rail signals/multiplexers to extend a rail network beyond 31 segments.
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Re: Crash & jam safe train exchange network (RHD LCC trains)

Post by Theikkru »

Updated the first post again to account for some edits to the blueprints that primarily improve compatibility between outpost and home stations when sharing the same depot. Some alert lights have been moved around to improve visibility as well, and a few tweaks to ease transition to multiple rail signals are also included.
The save file has progressed again, showcasing different examples of resource gathering, distribution, multiple rail signals, a custom addressed rail signal multiplexer, (allowing more rail signals to be stuffed onto the same home station network wires,) multiple signals being used for collecting the same resource, intersections between different rail signal zones, etc.
I should note that, while I've personally always left train stops with their auto-generated supporter names, (and the user guide is written accordingly,) managing this rail system can be simplified significantly by assigning all outpost stops in each schedule the same name.

P.S. If you just want to see the system in action, you can ignore my mod and load the save anyways. I keep forgetting to disable it for the save because I'm used to it, and the only qualitative effects in late-game are slightly different recipes for rocket fuel and sulfur.
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