Freight Trains Gone Crazy (since some update) - Any mods that will fix this?

[steevm]

To pre-empt all the people who are going to post this, I have a city that has totally separate rail networks for passengers and freight, and I have totally separated the internal and external networks. This post is not about that.

So, with that out of the way, here's what is happening: I reloaded my city after a hiatus of many months, during which time there have been at least two updates/DLC (maybe more). My city was working pretty well, but now that I have reloaded my saved game, I'm experiencing massive traffic jams with cargo trains.

Now I have a pretty extensive rail network with a lot of freight stations. What is happening is that the freight stations are spawning new trains rather than letting trains waiting to unload pull into the station. The result is that the network clogs up completely very quickly, as none of the trains can reach their destination. To add insult to injury, 90% of these newly spawned trains contain one single truck load of freight (7%), some contain two. Only very few (generally from the stations near the import/export hubs) have anywhere near a decent load. So each of these trains then trundles along the line towards the next station until it hits the previous train to get spawned (also carrying 1 cargo) while they sit there waiting for another train down the line to despawn.

I'm hoping there's a mod that stops the moroninc spawning of train after train with no cargo when there are other trains that need handling already on the line. You'd expect the game to be smart enough to realise that if there's a train waiting to unload, that train should unload instead of spawning an almost empty train. Otherwise it will of course become gridlock by design if you have even a tiny amount of industry using the train network.

My supposition is that something in the Mass Transit update probably borked things, as that presumably messed with the traffic side of things a lot. This was not an issue 12 months ago.

Any solutions?

[kristofburger]

Do you have any mods installed right now?

[AoD_lexandro]

How did you connect the stations to the line? Is it a direct connection? Ive found that if the station is made as a bypass on the line no trains get stuck.

That is to say the line goes past the station completely, and the station is connected as a junction.

Also make sure any modded trains you have dont have super long cargo carriages. THe longer the train the easier they get stuck.

[Timebobomb]

Can I just answer as to what I would do? It might cause other issues, at least temporarily. I would pause the game, delete a TINY section of track before each problem line. Unpause, let all the trains de-spawn. Pause, reconnect those lines. Resume.
The biggest issue I can think of is that it could cause your economy to take a dip, and the second biggest issue is traffic from all the trucks!

[grapplehoeker]

One simple rule...
Only connect one intercity terminal to one outside connection.
Do not allow connections to multiple terminals or multiple outside connections.

[Vimes]

Noting that you have mentioned that you have a completely separate internal and external network I can sympathise with your situation.
Mine is very much similar but I have also seen this happen with cargo shipping.
It is as though the commercial or industrial districts which are demanding either raw / produced goods have zero warehousing to hold stock, and so trains leave with as little as 7% of their capacity filled.
It is a pity that we do not have as much control over the commercial side of rail and ship movements as we do on the passenger side.
I build rail “bypasses” so that goods trains can pass another waiting to be loaded or unloaded at a station, and that helps. Raising or lowering the budget doesn’t seem to help much.
What has been mentioned already is not allow multiple terminal connections.
That might be useful in the respect of the 7% trains.
Having a “goods” line to and from all the raw industry producers to generic industry to manufacture and then commercial to sell might just be encouraging the nearly empty trains clogging up the lines.

IIRC in the game “Transport Fever” you can set the trains not to leave the stations until full, we should have something similar.

https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/847091616889168708/6E4EB1DAE9156EAFA99A7067B66673E593C5F1D7/

screen above shows 7% load from one terminal to another, both on local goods rail.

[AoD_lexandro]

You can also split your internal cargo lines to reduce clogging. Have some set for a resource line and a secondary line for goods transport. If you do it right you will find the goods trains will no longer clog your resource line theby stopping production.

[MarkJohnson]

Originally posted by grapplehoeker:

One simple rule...
Only connect one intercity terminal to one outside connection.
Do not allow connections to multiple terminals or multiple outside connections.

+1,000

This is always the issue with too many trains.

Share a save of your city, so we can better see it in motion. It should be a simple fix.

[Vimes]

Originally posted by -DI- rmjohnson144:

Originally posted by grapplehoeker:

One simple rule...
Only connect one intercity terminal to one outside connection.
Do not allow connections to multiple terminals or multiple outside connections.

+1,000

This is always the issue with too many trains.

Share a save of your city, so we can better see it in motion. It should be a simple fix.

So is the recommendation to connect, for example, a Ore industrial site by goods train to a generic industry site so that it can go between the two with either raw or ore produced goods for the generic industry to produce the finished goods for commercial...?
But then have a separate line from that generic industry to commercial…?

If so, I have been doing it less than optimally. I have tended to try to connect all of my raw producers in a line, with a train station at each, and then connect to the generic industry to make the goods for commercial, with that same line connecting in a loop.


Thanks for help, hope that it helps the OP too :)

[andypuk]

This started happening with the release of Mass Transit. I got the same problem. It gets worst when lines get blocked and cargo trains can't leave station, because the cargo still piles up in the station hence the spawning of multiple trains when the track clears which is what stops the waiting trains from entering the station. I seems to come in spurts and I don't know what causes it yet. Might be related to the rise and fall in population when death waves hit. New people moving in might be causing the shops to order more goods etc.

[grapplehoeker]

Originally posted by Vimes:

So is the recommendation to connect, for example, a Ore industrial site by goods train to a generic industry site so that it can go between the two with either raw or ore produced goods for the generic industry to produce the finished goods for commercial...?
But then have a separate line from that generic industry to commercial…?

If so, I have been doing it less than optimally. I have tended to try to connect all of my raw producers in a line, with a train station at each, and then connect to the generic industry to make the goods for commercial, with that same line connecting in a loop.

Yes and no.
This methodology has always been the correct way to differentiate your intercity traffic (trains, boats and planes) from your innercity network.
Now, with the MT update that has changed somewhat, because you can designate your terminal as an intercity terminal or as a local only innercity terminal. This is an important distinction and one you must make sure you make to avoid all of the previous errors.
So, in keeping with the simple rule,
Use only one intercity terminal to connect to a single outside connection.
The difference now though, is that you may connect that to innercity terminals for internal use, but you must make the intercity and innercity (local only) designations when you plop them.
It is still important though to make sure that no intercity terminals shares any outside connection with others. Each outside connection should be connected to a single intercity terminal - that has not changed.

[steevm]

Originally posted by andypuk:

This started happening with the release of Mass Transit. I got the same problem. It gets worst when lines get blocked and cargo trains can't leave station, because the cargo still piles up in the station hence the spawning of multiple trains when the track clears which is what stops the waiting trains from entering the station. I seems to come in spurts and I don't know what causes it yet. Might be related to the rise and fall in population when death waves hit. New people moving in might be causing the shops to order more goods etc.

I don't have any death waves because of mods, but I suspect what you say about Mass Transit being the culprit is true. Most of the replies here seem to ignore the fact that this didn't use to be an issue. My network hasn't changed; the game obviously has.

From watching the game, my assumption is that this is simply sloppy programming on CO's part. It wouldn't be the first time...

Why do I think this? Because as far as I can tell, as soon as any truck delivers cargo to a station, it tries to spawn a train. The orders for goods don't spawn trains or trucks; the way it works is that a truck sets out from a production site with cargo intended for a specific destination somewhere on the map. There's a dispatcher in the code that handles all these requests from the buildings that need resources. So when the truck spawns, it already has a destination. The game just looks for a route to its destination. This route can include switching modes of transport.

If the game decides that train is the way to go, the truck will drive to the first station on the route and drop off its cargo. Each station has an internal storage with all the shipments that are coming in. So the station is now responsible for shunting this cargo on to a train going to the next stop on the way.

Where the AI is now borked is that this spawning seems to happen pretty much immediately. Obviously CO didn't think through what this would mean (again, not the first time) if they don't ever unload cargo.


To the other posters, I appreciate that you are trying to help, but I'm not looking to redesign the train network in my massive city; it's a mess enough as it is. I'm just wondering if any modder has taken the time to fix the AI or not. As I say, this wasn't a problem 12 months ago. In other words, it's not the network, it's the borked implementation in one of the updates (presumably Mass Transit).


Edit: I did despawn the trains (with a single click using TM, rather than deleting tracks), but the problem doesn't go away. As soon as the first trucks start arriving at the internal stations, it all goes haywire.

[steevm]

Originally posted by ristosal:

Do you have any mods installed right now?

Yes, but I can't imagine any of them are to blame, if that is why you are asking. I can't think of anything that would impact on the train AI.

[AoD_lexandro]

Things I have done to "fix" my cargo trains;

1.) Drop funding to 50% day and night
2.) Make sure every single In & out track to the stations is the exact length of a train or two.
3.) If a station is extremely busy, I extended it to 5 train lengths for a buffer zone.
4.) Self contained import/export loop using two export stations per 1 import station.
5.) Seperated local cargo lines, one for resource to production the other for goods to commerce zones
6.) Self supporting economy that doesnt rely to much on imports. I only import ore atm ( its next for zoning).


With my city at 100k pop currently the cargo trains are running like clockwork.

[Vimes]

Originally posted by grapplehoeker:

Originally posted by Vimes:

So is the recommendation to connect, for example, a Ore industrial site by goods train to a generic industry site so that it can go between the two with either raw or ore produced goods for the generic industry to produce the finished goods for commercial...?
But then have a separate line from that generic industry to commercial…?

If so, I have been doing it less than optimally. I have tended to try to connect all of my raw producers in a line, with a train station at each, and then connect to the generic industry to make the goods for commercial, with that same line connecting in a loop.

Yes and no.
This methodology has always been the correct way to differentiate your intercity traffic (trains, boats and planes) from your innercity network.
Now, with the MT update that has changed somewhat, because you can designate your terminal as an intercity terminal or as a local only innercity terminal. This is an important distinction and one you must make sure you make to avoid all of the previous errors.
So, in keeping with the simple rule,
Use only one intercity terminal to connect to a single outside connection.
The difference now though, is that you may connect that to innercity terminals for internal use, but you must make the intercity and innercity (local only) designations when you plop them.
It is still important though to make sure that no intercity terminals shares any outside connection with others. Each outside connection should be connected to a single intercity terminal - that has not changed.

Thanks for that, it will be useful for passenger trains primarily. But we are talking about Goods trains carrying raw / produced material to and from industry and commerce. Goods terminals do not have an Intercity option.
But, like I noted, I do kkkeep internal and external lines apart.

[Vimes]

Originally posted by AoD_lexandro:

Things I have done to "fix" my cargo trains;

1.) Drop funding to 50% day and night
2.) Make sure every single In & out track to the stations is the exact length of a train or two.
3.) If a station is extremely busy, I extended it to 5 train lengths for a buffer zone.
4.) Self contained import/export loop using two export stations per 1 import station.
5.) Seperated local cargo lines, one for resource to production the other for goods to commerce zones
6.) Self supporting economy that doesnt rely to much on imports. I only import ore atm ( its next for zoning).


With my city at 100k pop currently the cargo trains are running like clockwork.

I did try and reduce funding, it made a small difference but I sill found 7% or much less than full trains filling the lines.
Buffer zones are important, whihc I do try and have. If they only moved trains which were full or at least 75% full then even those would not be needed as much.
Separated local cargo lines seems to be the next thing for me to try. The problem can be is the laying of multiple tracks and then the size of each station.
The self supporting economy is something that I almost did on my last map. I had less than 100 imports and yet around a couple of thousand exports IIRC. What can be surprising is if you look at the export tab, for example, one factory is exporting Ore and then one next to it is importing it....!


I struggle to remember exactly but I do not remember this goods train problem to be as bad as what I am finding it recently. There might be things that I need to do to improve it....

Not have a loop system, with each specialised industry connected in series to then finally connect to genric industry to produce goods and then onto commercial.

But the above will lead to more stations and tracks.

There should be an option to set trains to remain or appear only when a certain percentage has been filled or ready to load and then increase warehousing at the commercial side.