Factorio Forums

Morlow wrote:Ok riding trains is a great idea. One thing I don't like as my factory gets bigger is how long it takes to get everywhere..

Heck, I have dedicated stations for personal transport. A single locomotive can take you even to your very distant outposts in the blink of an eye.

Well, I use the RSO mod, so trains aren't optional, lol. Starting resources are slim, and the only coal I've found so far is about 300 klicks away from base, so I doubt using transport belts is feasible. This short video will give you some perspective on how much transport belt you'd need:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8xILLYNO_E

Haha...

my vote is for efficiency.

Trains will ultimately move items around the map faster, and in larger volumes.
but significantly more complicated to setup.

you can also hitch a ride on your Trains too, if you want to go where it's going. (or make dedicated high speed transport between bases)
mostly just a lot more efficient (and practical) than Belts or Pipes if you're dealing with very long distances. especially once your Factory starts to get huge - Trains can easily cross across each other, but pipes and belts can get really difficult to spiderweb between each other due to limited 'bandwidth' of separation choices i.e. underground Belts/Pipes.

the best part is that Trains can obey 'traffic' problems. unlike Belts, which if you need say, Iron and Copper to a location, you can put a maximum of two items on a belt (two sides) at a time and still have an organized feed line that you can then reroute to other machines later on to feed many things at once. since items that don't get used sitting on the belt will cause jams.
while Trains can all use the same rails without causing problems. if you have enough Trains running on a rail system they can have to wait for each other, but they won't mix items so things will still get there very efficiently.

besides, if you need to run 10 belts from A to B to move items quickly, that's a lot of crap to pick up later once you have no need for that area anymore.

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ofcourse this introduces risk since if you stand in front of a Train, the Train always wins.
not a big deal as long as you look upwards from crossings to make sure you're not about to get turned into meat pasta if you step onto the rails.


start simple, and expand from there. don't try to convert everything to rail, just stuff that needs to move high volumes of resources quickly.
as aforementioned (by others as well as myself) Rail Systems can handle a lot of things at once, since the tracks are just a high speed road, they don't do anything themselves, it's the Cargo Cars that carry everything and do all of the transporting work. and they can carry a lot of stuff at once!

do you 'need' Trains? no. doesn't make them not highly effective.

The train might win in the beginning, but once you have a few shields up, the train won't kill you.

And setting up a train-system isn't that difficult, once you have set up your unloading station, the rest is a no-brainer.
And as I said before, a train-network is a lot easier to expand than a belt-network, just connect 2 rail-lines to your existing ones, and done.

nobodx wrote:The train might win in the beginning, but once you have a few shields up, the train won't kill you.

Unless it's at high speed. Also I recently tested running trains into things (mainly Tanks and other Trains). Once trains hit a certain threshold (generally 6-long travelling at high speed - though mass seems more important than speed) they automatically win any encounter completely destroying any objects in their path without taking any damage or slowing down at all - the distinction is quite clear, if you take 5-long train of pure locomotives (all same direction) and ram it at full speed into a Tank, the Tank will barely survive and the Train will be halted. But if you take a 6-long train of pure locomotives and ram it into a Tank at full speed the Tank will be obliterated, in fact it will cheerfully plow through 100 Tanks in a row without slowing down (When two such death trains collide, one will be obliterated and the other undamaged).
My theory is if the collision would deal enough damage to destroy the train instead the struck object is obliterated and the Train continues on undamaged and not slowed down. Kind of a hardcoded "Trains always win" rule.

BlakeMW wrote:Kind of a hardcoded "Trains always win" rule.

If we had sigs, this would be mine.

You mean like this Fellow?

http://youtu.be/09EWchLSeH4