Goods Storage

[Lister471]

Hello,Does anyone know if its possible to store items at a cargo train station?

I have a line going north to south, picking up iron and coal on the way down. I want to drop something off at the south station by road, then have the train drop it off at the north station where i can collect it again by road, the reason i want to use roads is that the distance is just to small for a train.

Cheers in advance.

[Saint Landwalker]

You can't have indefinite storage; items only get distributed to stations if they have somewhere they want to go.

That said, as long as that's not your goal, and if you're just asking about multi-modal transportation, then yes, you can definitely do that: If you want to have a truck line between the industry and a train station, then a train line to near another industry, and another truck line between the second station and the second industry, you can, and it will work just fine, as long as the lines are set up properly, the lines are operational, and there is demand to "pull" the cargo through the chain.

[Lister471]

No dont want to store forever, just need to store then till the train comes. Transport Fever is a good game but personally i prefer locomotion I basically am making steel, right next to that is a stone thing, at the other end of the line is a thing that wants stone and slag, now these distances are very very short, not worth having a train. I want to bring the stone by road to the station that has the slag, transport them both to the north station, unload and store, and then collect by road.

[Saint Landwalker]

Originally posted by Lister471:

No dont want to store forever, just need to store then till the train comes.

Then that'll work just fine. (Just make sure you're also delivering construction materials from the ConMats factory to a town, or it will stop demanding stone/slag.)

[clixor]

Originally posted by Lister471:

No dont want to store forever, just need to store then till the train comes. Transport Fever is a good game but personally i prefer locomotion I basically am making steel, right next to that is a stone thing, at the other end of the line is a thing that wants stone and slag, now these distances are very very short, not worth having a train. I want to bring the stone by road to the station that has the slag, transport them both to the north station, unload and store, and then collect by road.

That's perfectly doable. However, especially early game trucks dont have much capacity. So if you are really pushing those factories/quarries (in terms of volumes) then the truck depots will become a bottle-neck. So i would advise you to place several truck depots in range of each other and use them specifically for drop-off or pickup.

Sometimes it's even worth considering hooking up a certain further supply away by train than a close one by truck. But that's also the long term planning if the potential is there to haul back stuff in the future.

[Lister471]

cheers for the advise will give it a try tonight.

[ScruffyBamboo]

Originally posted by clixor:

That's perfectly doable. However, especially early game trucks dont have much capacity. So if you are really pushing those factories/quarries (in terms of volumes) then the truck depots will become a bottle-neck. So i would advise you to place several truck depots in range of each other and use them specifically for drop-off or pickup.

Very true, although I've had some success with setting up "clone" lines. If a truck station is getting bottle-necked, I'll add another station across the street (at both ends of the line), and crate a second line. Most of the time, the game will happily split the goods between the two lines, allowing a lot more trucks to pick up and drop off goods at once. I say "most of the time", because I've had a few situations where the game essentially refused to use the second line, for some reason I'm still trying to figure out. But for the 95% of the time that it works, it really helps. This is a LIFE-SAVER with ships, btw.

Originally posted by clixor:

Sometimes it's even worth considering hooking up a certain further supply away by train than a close one by truck. But that's also the long term planning if the potential is there to haul back stuff in the future.

I've noticed this as well, and I've sometimes intentionally bypassed a closer factory in order to set up a nice, straight, flat rail line to further one, since distance is a large factor in the amount of money you get from the delivery. My most profitable cargo line would pick up logs from halfway across the (Huge) map - every delivery was over 10M (on Medium difficulty). and there were 8 trains on that line.

[SBGaming]

Truck lines can be incredibly effective for the transportation of goods, early in the game for not a lot of investment. Bottlenecks do happen, especially when multiple lines come into the same truck station, but I've avoided this and reduced the bottleneck by having a couple truck stations with a shared catchment area. Fuel trucks go in one, Food Trucks go in another, and Inter/Intracity Road Freight to the nearby city goes in a third. Goods shuffle around automatically via catchment as desired, and with a train freight station nearby the goods can also come in and go out unrestricted.

[maculator]

I did almost every mission in the america campange with trucks. They're pretty effective if you spam like 700 of them on the map :D
The mission with Indianapolis was really funny Farms to Food Factory was a plane red line of trucks.