Factorio Forums

I posted this few days ago in the thread about electric locomotives, but it seems to have went under the radar, so I'm putting it in separate thread.

I have a new idea on electric trains. That is that electric trains should not serve as replacement/upgrade of burner trains, but to fill the gap of medium distance transport, which is too long for belts and too short for burner trains.
I thought of a electrically powered self-driving cargo wagon that works like this:

1) Powered wagon can only ride on electrified rails. These would be connected to electric network through some kind of interface. These rails could be also used by burner trains, but are a necessity for electric ones.
2) Powered wagons would accelerate very quickly, but have 50 km/h top speed (blue belt goes at 20 km/h).
3) Powered wagons would be able to go in both directions, which would make terminus stations more useful. I'll get to the "Why" of this later.
4) Otherwise they would behave like standard trains.
(This could also work with electric locomotives)

The "Why" of this:
The main advantage of powered wagons is, that they are compact and so are their stations (mostly terminus i believe). Their slow speed and (probably) expensive recipe would make them inferior to burner trains on long distances,while their size and required infrastructure would make them inferior to belts on very short distances. However they would reign supreme on medium distances, such as transporting ore from nearby mine, stuff between nearby factories or inside a huge factory. I can even imagine a setup, where burner trains drop off resources at the edge of a factory and electric trains bring them inside.

In my opinion, there is no need for a new type of railroad. Rather, the existing railroad should be changed, so that it does not have the following disadvantages you mentioned:

1. Terminus stations should be feasible, i.e. trains should be able to drive in reverse without sacrificing propulsion power, as is the case in reality. This has been suggested in the following thread:
   viewtopic.php?f=6&t=40644 propulsion power of bidirectional trains
2. It should be possible to set speed limits for trains, so that they do not drive at maximum speed right through the middle of your base, endangering the lives of all players. This has been suggested in the following thread:
   viewtopic.php?f=6&t=32459 Railway Speed Limits

You can already do speed limits with signals and some circuit magic. Trains will slow when approaching a red signal. Put normal signals somewhat close together, with each signal linking to the two next signals in chain. Set all signals to be read, and all except the first and last 2 to go red on "Red = 1"
This will cause the signal in front of the train to flash green as it approaches, but the one beyond that to continually be red - and forces a train to slow. How slow exactly is determined by how far you space out the signals.

The slow speed is not the main point, I just picked it to prevent the electric trains from replacing burner ones entirely.
The main point is their compact size.

Given enough utilisation to amortise the infrastructure costs, electric trains are strictly superior to fuel-burning trains IRL.

I could see an individual wagon not having as much power as a dedicated fuel-burning locomotive, but if you have each wagon provide (say) 1/3rd of the power of a locomotive (but don't cap the speed), a 3-wagon electric train would have the same performance as a LCC, the capacity of a LCCC, but with the added overhead of having to provide specialised track for it to drive on.