Factorio Forums

I'm trying a city block plan for the first time. 4x4 chunks bordered by a two-lane train system. Stations will be parallel to the sides of the square.

I need to make a decision on whether to have a station design with one-direction entrance and exit, or a more conventional bidirectional entrance and exit. With the unidirectional one, trains would have to go around the block (right, left, left, left) to change direction, or perhaps I could use a roundabout intersection.

For people who have tried city blocks before, what do your station entrances look like? Have you tried one or the other and had a bad experience?

Here's what it would look like with a bidirectional station. The main problem here is that station design is very inflexible and takes a lot of space. Here's what a unidirectional station design would look like. There's way more room for station expansion or buffers and it is more compact. I've replaced the intersections with roundabouts so trains can turn around in this example, but using faster intersections and making trains circle the entire block to change directions is also possible.

The version with the roundabouts decrease traffic troughput by 50%.
In case you want to place lots of this city blocks, you might run into troughput problems too, there will be a lot of congestion.
After having that problem too, I came up with this (2-way/4lanes right hand drive), which works ok so far (still building on this map, but had 16x4 blocks running on last map):

How about making the city blocks bigger? 6x6, maybe even 8x8 and have room for a little stacker.

What train length do you plan on using?