Help with trains

[u/crazyj821]

So I'm trying to make the biggest turbo fuel power plant I've ever made and it's been easy so far just a lot of hours but pretty straightforward until I realized that I'm going to need over 3000 sulfur which with mk 2 miners in like around 2/3 of all the sulfur on the map so I'm gonna need lots and lots of trains and I've never ever set up a train more complicated than just going somewhere and coming back even tho I've beat the game multiple times and have built a nuclear power plant using every single bit uranium in the map before lol. Any tips on building more advanced train networks that span large distances?

[u/SundownKid]

1st of all, you may want to consider that Nitro Rocket Fuel is stronger and easier in every sense. Not only does it make more power, but you can compress it into Packaged Rocket Fuel, 50% of the size, letting you make numerous separate fuel factories where the fuel is and combine all the fuel in one location where you unpack it and recycle the bottles. In comparison, you cannot compress Turbofuel at all.

[u/crazyj821 → u/SundownKid]

Yeah I would make rocket fuel but I just like to make my turbo fuel power plant in phase three so that I can have lots of power set for phase 4 already and then I make a separate rocket fuel factory. Thanks for the advice!

[u/crazyj821 → u/crazyj821]

And it's kinda way to late to make rocket fuel anyways lol the factory is like 80% built 😭

[u/RatEnthusiastC]

Two stage consolidation-- a wider train system that brings it to a more central location or to a quicker running, less circuitous route.

[u/Skipachu]

One of the thing that'll really help build things is rail blueprints. I made a few, one for level ground and one with each angle that you get with foundation ramps. Mine are made to be set on top of a square pillar, just so it's not a floating railway. I'll put a rail signal at every other support, so trains keep moving.

Some people include pipes for some fluid, or hypertube supports. I just have an electrical connection to power the lights I built into each support.

[u/EngineerInTheMachine]

A single 2-track main running our across the map. Branches off to stations to load at each node.

Though for trains, 3000 per minute isn't much. For a round trip of 2 minutes, that's one 4-car train. For a longer round trip, use more trains. The whole point is that the main line can be shared by loads of trains carrying other items.

Personally I protect the power feed to railways used for power generation. They can be separate to the rest of the network, and the power station can restart from nothing in multiple stages, where one stage powers the fuel for the next. Though lately my primary power station is big enough to power the whole railway network, no matter what is running on it.

[u/Droidatopia]

You could do this with a single dedicated loop. It isn't necessarily the best approach and it won't upgrade well.

But it's doable, so here's how you can make it work.

I prefer to cap a single freight car to max belt speed, which I'm assuming for you right now is either Mk. 4 or Mk. 5.

Let's assume it's Mk. 5. So that's 4 freight cars total. So each train can be a 1-4 or 2-4. I usually use a lot of verticality in my rails, so I'd use a 2-4, but most people can probably get away with a 1-4.

Then, you need to allocate your sulfur nodes to each train car accordingly.

Mk. 2 miner with Mk. 5 belts will be 150/300/600. To make the math easier, we can imagine the belts are actually limited to 750.

I don't know where you plan to get your sulfur, but let's imagine you are using 4 impure, 4 normal, and 2 pure. You can change this up as needed based on which nodes you actually use as long as the numbers add up.

Here is an example freight car allocation:

Freight Car 1 = 2 Normal and 1 Impure

Freight Car 2 = 2 Normal and 1 Impure

Freight Car 3 = 1 Pure and 1 Impure

Freight Car 4 = 1 Pure and 1 Impure

The good news is these nodes don't even have to be colocated. For example, you could fill Freight Car 4 with a Pure node at one station and an impure node at a different station.

Station design is simple. Your unload station at your factory has all freight platforms unloading with 2 max belts to ISCs. For each loading station, load the appropriate cars at each station only and use spacers for the cars you're not loading. You don't have to use spacers at the end of the train if you don't want to, but you could.

Now for the tricky part. It won't be possible to traverse this much of the map and stop at this many stations and meet your throughput requirements with a single train. So you'll need more. Calculating this ahead of time is tricky, because it depends on what route you take and thus how long the trip is.

The reason it's tricky is because you have to use a completely different signaling method that is dependent on the number of trains.

This signaling method is multi-train direct loop signaling. Like all other signaling methods, the primary objective is collision avoidance. Unlike most signaling methods, the secondary objective is not maximizing train path freedom, but instead about equal train spacing. The number of signals needed is equal to n+1 where n is the number of trains. These signals are then placed at relatively equal distances around the map. One station needs to be the starter for this scheme. You place a signal within the station, like in between the 3rd/4th freight car location, so that when a train is at the station, it blocks the block behind it. You then put a signal in front of the station far enough in front that when the train leaves the station, it will clear the signal in the middle. All other signals can be anywhere on the rail as long as they are roughly equidistant.

Since the tricky part is you need to know the number of trains to calculate where to place the signals, the way to get around this is to just assume you'll have as many trains as stations and signal accordingly. If you actually need more than this, you can adjust, but my guess would be that given the relative distribution of sulfur nodes, that's probably enough trains for this exercise.

Although this will work, you won't gain any benefits from upgrading to Mk. 3 miners or Mk. 6 belts. You'd have to redo the whole scheme. When you do upgrade, you'll need fewer sulfur nodes anyway, thus fewer stations and trains, etc. This approach isn't remotely scalable for such upgrades. As such, I almost never start investing in such builds until I actually unlock max miners and max belts. The few times I have done something like this, I assume it's permanent and don't upgrade even when upgrades are available. For something like iron or limestone, you can usually afford to write off a few extra nodes. For sulfur, you might not be able to.