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I'm playing the railroad map, first time. New at this. I found that the car is a death trap. The tank is slow, unless run on rocket fuel then its brakes make it a death trap. Then I thought, the trains are doing a great job getting from place to place.. Why not make a private train to use as transportation?

I tried it and it works great!

Set up private sidings at your different locations, just for parking your ride. Put together a double ended, no car train. Set the wait condition of each station to "train<0". Now, no matter what, when you get there it'll stay 'till you hop in and tell it to go somewhere else.

Need to check out Copper Town? Its night time, crawling with bugs and on the other side of the world. No worries! Hop in your train, tell it where to go, sit back and read a book.

I did a search on the forum and it seems like this is not as common of a trick and I expected. Is anyone else doing something like this?

-jim lee

It's a fairly common tactic, although people have their own way. My train tends to have like 12 wagons, loaded up by requester chests to build basically anything (filter the wagon inventory slots). I also tend to not bother with the private sidings except at the main base where it gets restocked.

In MP the car and tank are even less usable due to latency.

There is a nice mod just for this:
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Shuttle_Train_Continued

You can turn a train into a shuttle through an item in the added vehicle grid. Then when you enter it brings up a list of stations you can go to. The list can be filtered so it only shows you shuttle stations

I take my train with me so I don't have to run back to it.

And with the new ctrl-click temporary stations introduced in 0.17 that let you stop anywhere, there's really no need for shuttle stations in my opinion.

The part that I really liked with the private sidings setup is that the train can navigate through all the regular train traffic, whereas the manual controlled ones can not. I like the idea of loading with all sorts of goodies so I can build stuff.

-jim lrr

jim lee wrote: Sat Mar 09, 2019 1:08 am The part that I really liked with the private sidings setup is that the train can navigate through all the regular train traffic, whereas the manual controlled ones can not. I like the idea of loading with all sorts of goodies so I can build stuff.

-jim lrr

True, im probably just lazy, I use the main train stop for the outpost and if an ore train gets delayed then oh well lol. A lot of these outposts you will build (so no other trains then) and almost never visit again until the ore runs out and it is time to tear it down.

Never use a manual controlled train on the main network. You will cause a collision lol, especially with how fast they can go on rocket fuel through junctions.

jim lee wrote: Fri Mar 08, 2019 10:34 pm I'm playing the railroad map, first time (...) Why not make a private train to use as transportation?

I tried it and it works great!

Yes, a private train is very nice for these things. I combine that with my supply / construction train which is 2 engines, 3 wagons and one artillery. By default it's at its loading station, refilling its stock with miners, belts, rail items, chests, inserters, walls, turrets, poles, radar, ammo... - but I use it readily to get wherever I need to go when it's longer distance. At the same time it has everything I need to construct a new outpost.

Well yeah, that's how you navigate a properly sized base without going insane.
The only alternative I have seen so far is the helicopter mod but you'll still want a train with build materials.

I carry around a locomotive and a stack of rocket fuel. When I'm done working at one outpost, I use that to get to the next "job site". Generally the traffic disruption isn't too severe for one passenger pulling into a station.

If I run out of raw materials while on an expedition, I have a long refueling train back home which can be sent to the next outpost to get more materials. If the current site doesn't already have a side track for the refueling train, it's pretty easy to add.

I usually just hop on whatever train is going in the right direction - hobo style. But I also keep an engine in my pocket, just in case.

I set up an LLCCCCCCC train which gets restocked at the main base and usually carries enough stuff to drop an average sized outpost. A second LLACCCCA train is set up facilitate clearing an area frontier area out and expanding the base. Additionally I have a few LC trains, that I have pre-programed to visit specific outpots. I tend to use the LC trains about once per 8-10 gaming hours on a map to check all the outposts, removing expanding miners, belts and so on. The last cargo wagon in each of those trains is usually empty, and unloaded stuff no longer needed on mining outposts, or excess lumber or stone that ends up in my inventory.

For the most part, at this point, I hardly ever manually drive trains. But just into it, and tell it where to go.

Hiladdar

With the new temporary stops it got alot better.

Calling a train was always easy, just name all your PAX stations the same, do player detection via wired gate to enable just that one station.

But automaticly driving to where you wanted to go?
All PAX stations were closed if set up as described above. You could just place another next to them, named different and search for it in the schedule (which you had to set up)
It got worse with heavy modded games, where i had MANY different districts and a PAX station in every one of them
What i ended up with was that i just kept a few i often used and added/dumped temporary ones to/from the schedule, or the list would have been to long

I once tried to do it via set global wired signals, enable a far away station, but that was impractical.

Nowadays, you set up part one to call it, if you forgot where you left it, and just set a temp stop where you wanna go.

I´m loving it!

Read it, like my solution better.

-jim lee