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I know that the idea seems crazy, attracting them instead of destroying them. But don't worry, it's for the purpose of destroying them. Currently I've got an artillery train that loops around my base and stops multiple times to fire shells, each of these stops is heavily guarded and the chance of one getting destroyed is extremely low. But then the biters started attacking the actual track instead of the guarded stations, resulting in the train stopping it's loop and becoming extremely vulnerable. Hence my question if I can attract/bait them in to attacking the stations instead of the track.
Is this a stupid idea and should I just go back to having fixed artillery? Or is there some hope in this?

Thanks in advance.

EDIT
Thanks to y'all, I formulated (I'm using words like formulated to sound smart) a theory called the sound theory (patent pending), basically saying that they're attracted to the loudest thing. Before posting I had the train staying at the station for only 20 seconds before leaving, which meant that by the time the biters had arrived, my train was already at the next stop; because said train was firing and they could "hear" it, they ended up somewhere in the midpoint between stations, resulting in the track being destroyed. I now have the train stay at each station for 2 minutes, to be sure that even the furthest population's have time to reach the station to get annihilated, with this implemented for about 6 hours I haven't had any problems yet.

Once again thanks to all,
Mr. Mindstorms

AFAIK biters will only destroy tracks when they are responding to an attack by train and there is no train there when they arrive. Sometimes personal laser defense will hit a worm or spawner as a train goes by and cause this, I'm not sure about artillery trains, but perhaps your artillery stops should be behind walls or well within range of turrets.

I never did have much luck with artillery trains except for transporting shells and shooting from behind walls.

Basically when artillery shoots a spawner or worm, biters will gather and then march to the spot where the shot came from. If nothing is there but tracks they will attack the tracks.

Artillery is supposed to be the way to attract biters and spitters.

adam_bise wrote: perhaps your artillery stops should be behind walls or well within range of turrets

The OP sounds like already doing that.

An automatic train witht artillery wagon should only shoot when stopped at a station (if you drive it manually), so I don't see trafic causing artillery wagon to shoot from where they're not supposed to shoot from either.

So they probably are wandering colonists, aggressor triggered by pollution, or aggressor triggered by an artillery fire from an outpost which is not the closest to the nest.

You can tell whether the 2nd will happen by looking at your pollution cloud in the mini map, and you can tell if the later is possible by looking at the turret range of an artillery canon, at your current status of clearing nests, and at the spacing and layout of your outposts in the mini map. If you can witness such aggression, the number of biters and their provenance, it would also tells a lot about the cause.

Most of these issues should be resolved once your artillery has cleared most nest and is only doing maintenance against expansion, but it does require you to have enough firepower - number of opperational artillery wagons - sufficiently spread -enough trains- to maintain a perimeter, and to clear it in the first place. More importantly, it does require you to go manually repair the tracks as soon as they are attacked for some times.

Which is why I would suggest you to place a sparse but full coverage of gun turrets on the outer layers of your rails (presumably with blueprint and personal robotport from a slow manually driven train), with the best available ammunition in them. You don't need to put a lot of magazines in each turret (5-20), but you can surround them with cheap stone wall, it's mainly a failsafe measure against weak attacks with disproportionate consequences,and also should give you information about your weak points and the nature of the attacks.

If you're confident enough about what portion of the track the biters attack, you can put gun turrets only there. Or you can put 0 gun turret initially, and place them down at the damage rail section at the same time you go repair them.

The fully automated solution would require a full robot port and radar coverage of your railroad, but it sounds overkill, I think the sparse gun turrets solution should amply suffice (and at least should be tried first).