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I have a small problem with the train shedule......

I have 3 stations for some delivery train.

* pickup station
* delivery station
* fuel station

The pick up station is always on.
The delivery station is only abled when supply runs low so most of the time its disabled.
And at least i need a station to pickup fuel for the train.

My troubl is when there is no need to delivery anything the train will travel from and to the two remaing stations in the shedule. Thouse causing some unwanted traffic

My question is how do i break the train-travel till the delivery station is abled then delivery the goods -> go to fueling - then sitting idle at the pickup station till the next call....


All three stations are unfortunately wide apart so there is no much sense to build a long green / red wire connection.
Only solution for now i have to deliver the fuel to the pickup station so the fueling is made automatically whilst sitting in the booth, but that also require some long distance delivery of the fuel either by belt or additional fuel delivery train.

This is not a use case for deactivating stations, this feature is for the case that you have several identical stations to deactivate some (never all) to guide the train to the active ones. You should simply use waiting conditions in the stations instead, so the train stays there until it is full/empty/fueled, the Inactivity condition works well for that.

i can check for 200 inactivty but thats the same as with wait time ?

so after 200 sec the train will drive even if it should not.

Or did i miss someting ?

Note: I'm assuming you have multiple stations with the same name. Because otherwise simply wait for full/empty.

There is nothing much you can do. You already found the best vanilla solution of shipping fuel to the unloading station. The most long distance stations are usually mines, which deliver to smelter. And smelter need fuel anyway. So refuel the train on delivery. For the plates refuel the train on pickup at the smelter. That should cover the most annoying cases. For the rest I would really put up some circuit wires if they have no fuel source near them. Other alternatives are mods like Logistic Train Network.

After that it gets funky. You need to set the train to only leave the unloading station when the loading station is enabled. Given the distances to e.g. mines adding a wire is impractical. I also guess you don't have roboports all the way or you could use wireless.

So what other ways are there to communicate?

1) You can setup a short parallel rail track with another load and unload station. Have a track going from the unload station to the main train tracks but block it with a red signal (circuit controlled and always red) and a chain signal and full signal (S) before the fork. Have the fake load station disabled unless signal (S) is red. Either use a two-headed train or loop the track from the fake load station back to the fake unload station. Now set the train schedule for the train to just the load and unload station with Xs inactivity.

What does all this crazy do you might ask? Well... The train will stay at the fake unload station with no path. Then when the real load station gets enabled it will leave the station trying to reach it. But as it hits the (S) signal the much closer fake load station gets enabled so it goes there. The alway red and chain signal prevent the train form ever getting somewhere else. Xs later the train will return to the fake unload station, wait Xs and then everything repeats.

You can attach a wire to the fake load or unload station and set it to show the train ID. That gives you a signal at most every 2*Xs if the real load station is enabled and you can set your real train to leave the unload station on circuit condition when that happens.

Note: load == pickup, unload == delivery

2) There is no need to refuel for every trip. So instead of a refuel station call the refuel station pickup too. At the delivery station keep a count down of how many trips the train has done. When it reaches 0 enable the refuel station (which must be significantly nearer than the real pickup station). When the train arrives at the refuel station you reset the count down timer.

Check how many fuels you need for one round trip, round up. Then devide the total fuel by that and take half of that as your reset value. That should give you plenty of time to refuel but still have the train wait at delivery most of the time.

nosports wrote:i can check for 200 inactivty but thats the same as with wait time ?
so after 200 sec the train will drive even if it should not.
Or did i miss someting ?

The idea is, that, in the case that not enough stuff is available to pick up, the train will simply wait in the pick up station until it is fully loaded. If it can not deliver because the storage is full, it will stay in the station until it is empty. There would be no unnecessary trips. If absolutely nothing is loaded at all, then yes, the inactivity condition would trigger, but this should never happen in a working setup and you can use the full/empty or other conditions instead.