Factorio Forums

So I got my factory set up, but my railway expansion is somewhat hampered by me not understanding the light positioning in loops and stations. Been hammering my head against this for like a solid 3 hours now.

First, I have no idea how to place lights in a multi lane station using this design:

steamcommunity(dot)com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=665507809

I intend to have a 4 station setup all with the same name where the trains just find their own spot for unloading.

And more importantly, I can't for the life of me figure out how to make trains not smash each other in these:

steamcommunity(dot)com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=665507741

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Had to edit the urls, there's obviously a hhtp and a . to be *drumroll* inserted manually...

I modified your images to show where you would want signals:

http://imgur.com/a/NFbqt

For your image of the station tracks, it looks like you want the trains to arrive and depart on the same single track, so I added signals accordingly. Your second image with the roundabout loop would need to swap the signals if you wanted to reverse the direction of the top/bottom and left/right tracks. One of the biggest rules of thumb that I use with regards to train tracks is to only use regular Rail Signals if there is room after the signal to fit an entire train (for whatever your biggest train size is in your network). If there isn't enough space for that before you have an intersection or lane crossing of any kind, then you want to use Chain Rail Signals instead.

I also suggest you check out this awesome tutorial video on trains, it goes into great detail:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZiL7_vfJtQ

One major flaw with your roundabout is that it doesn't allow right turns. The entrance curved tracks should connect one tile earlier (this is easier when you keep two rails' width between parallel tracks instead of the four you currently have).

Thanks for the feedback. I couldn't get the chain signals to work on the station entrances, but I found a workaround with regular signals, no crashes so far. Got a 5 row station now and oil, coal copper and iron coming in at a steady pace, actually more than my factory can churn at the moment.
The loop I plopped down once and made a blueprint of it. Works like a charm. <3