Wagons and mines

[ChrisR]

I really love this game, but I’m not technically minded as most who play it lol
I’m really liking trains which I thought I never would do, used to be scared of using them but they’re so good. Just got a question about mines and wagons and throughput that I can’t get my head around. I see a lot of people who use 6-8 maybe more wagons on a mine. Does that not exceed the output of a mine or doesn’t it matter.
Say if a mine is covered in miners and it outputs 140 per sec ( bearing in mind that the ones on the edges will deplete sooner because there’s little ore underneath them), and my inserters can move 8 per sec from belt to chest. With 8 wagons that’s potentially moving 384 a sec off that mine, when its only producing 140. Is this what people do or they only using 8 wagons on say a big output mine of say 400 per sec. Thanks

[PunCrathod]

Yes people do use bigger trains as they are cheap to make and there is little downsides. Also what I do is have multiple mines. And then count the ore in the chests on the mine station(name all stations that have the same ore with the same name) and set the trainlimit of the station based on how many trains worth of ore are at the station so a train only goes to a mine if the station can fill up the train. This way you can have a fewer trains than mines. And as long as there is enough room to park all the trains at the smelter you never have to worry about traffic jams caused by too many trains. And adding new mines is easy because you only have to setup the station properly and trains will automatically be able to use it.

[Fel]

In many cases people pick one or two train sizes and stick with it, because it makes it much easier to design intersections and train stops.

There isn't really much detriment in using longer trains, as long as you provide them with enough locomotives.
Even if it means that your theoretical loading throughput is higher than what you are producing, it just means that your train will be waiting a bit longer there to be loaded.
As long as the buffer on the unloading side is big enough to sustain the demand for the train's whole cycle, the length of that cycle isn't an issue.

There are many different ways to use trains, ranging from the very basic trains that have dedicated loading, unloading and often even rails to a full logistics system where each station requests trains for loading or unloading depending on what they need at the time.

[AlexMBrennan]

The way train schedules work it is possible to have multiple ore mines served by the same train (build multiple loading stations with the same name and set the train limit to 1 when there is enough ore to fill one train). Making the train longer will allow each train to serve more ore mines. Longer trains also reduce rail traffic which is a nice bonus.

With 8 wagons that’s potentially moving 384 a sec off that mine, when its only producing 140

You need to consider that trains spend a lot of their time not being loaded: they need to be loaded, then they need to travel to an unloading station, then they need to be unloaded, and finally they need to travel back to the ore mine. This means that the loading speed has to be at least 2x the production speed - potentially a lot more if the train has to travel a long distance.

[knighttemplar1960]

If you are building a megabase (or just playing more after rocket launch) you open up infinite researches. Mining productivity is a big one. Each additional research increases production from each miner (and oil pump jack) by 10%. The extra ore produced this way is free and doesn't deplete the ore patch. When ore production drops due to depletetion and it gets to the point that not enough ore is coming into your smelter arrays per second you can just mine another ore patch and add another train or 2 if needed or if you are expanding production an additional smelter array (and potentially several ore patches).

[shadain597]

If you don't like diving into the technical side of things too much, then I'd say don't worry about the amount per second. Much like assembly lines, you can set up something that looks about right (TLAR) and keep an eye on it to see if any problems occur. As long as the unloading stations aren't running out of items, it's probably fine. If it is running out, figure out if it's a train or mine deficiency and address that.

As others pointed out, its a good idea to standardize your train lengths, though its also common enough to have a few different lengths for different purposes. Like, long trains for basic ores/oil and shorter ones for uranium, defense resupply, finished products, etc.

[Hedning]

Originally posted by AlexMBrennan:

This means that the loading speed has to be at least 2x the production speed - potentially a lot more if the train has to travel a long distance.

This is an important point and the universal solution is to have the inserter load the items into a chest and then the train is loaded from the chest.

[ChrisR]

Many thanks everyone for your comments. Some really good info there to help me. I'm understanding it more now. So as long as i have a stacker with fully loaded spare trains, it doesnt matter if my mine output per sec is lower than the wagon loading time.
This screenshot is of my copper production. It will output 4 blue belts of copper plate. As you can see it has 2 trains each with 2 wagons. So are you saying i could have 1 train with 4 wagons supplying these 4x72 smelter arrays. The 4 wagons would unload 211 ore and my arrays need 180. Then as long as i have enough mines and then set the stations to open only when there is either enough to fill the wagons.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2874136827

[Nonotorious]

Multiple stations with the same name that turn on when the chests get full enough to load a train. Also you can drop a bunch of roboports and use bots to fill up the chests, since bots can overlap you can fill a chest much faster than with a belt and inserter, throw in some speed modules and you can fill up trains pretty quickly.
Btw 2 trains for 2 wagons is overkill and probably won't be much faster than a single train, what's more important imo is the fuel type, you can see the acceleration value on the fuel. Better fuels not only accelerate faster they last longer aswell.

[fractalgem]

6-8 wagons seems excessive. I suppose if you truly had some sort of mega base and mega ore deposit you could have an entire dedicated train network for massive mega trains just for ores.

A lot of train network designs expect you to only have 2-3 wagons on each train.

[AlexMBrennan]

I suppose if you truly had some sort of mega base and mega ore deposit you could have an entire dedicated train network for massive mega trains just for ores.

Not really - without bridges or tunnels you can't really build separate networks so you just need to pick one train size and stick with it even if that means using 1-8 blue circuit trains that run once per hour.

[Fel]

It's easier to just limit the train's inventory slots for those items you need way less of or to only load one wagon.

That being said, it is kind of possible to have a separate train network for raw materials (so ores and oil) since those would be coming from further out compared to the factory itself.
I just don't see much of a point in doing that unless you intend to centralize them before dispatching it throughout your factory.

[THE kilroy]

Smaller trains are easier to manage, but larger trains, accompanied by a network properly designed for them, can result in very high throughput values.

It is possible to have different sizes of trains on the same network, but loading fuel and optimizing intersections has diminishing returns.

[knighttemplar1960]

I would point out that if you set up your rail blocks and intersections for the longer trains without dead locks shorter trains will not cause deadlocks either. Its when you set up for 1-4 trains but also run 2-8 trains that you can have a problem.