Production chains and goods exchange between buildings

[praet]

I've been trying to optimize production chains by building new industries close to each other without long transport chains in between to focus on distribution networks rather than intermediate products.

As an easy example, I'd have a farm and a food processing plant next to each other. Ideally, cattle and grain from the farm would be immediately accessible for the food processing plant without having a train or truck line in between. I'd then only have to deal with distributing food to the cities nearby and generating demand for the final product. Is this possible and under what circumstances?

Can two industry buildings exchance goods through proximity of each other or through proximity to a truck or train freight station covering both buildings? Or can goods only exchanged when they went through a freight line in between?

[SBGaming]

If you tried to put two industries next to each other (Farm and Food Processing), and the Farm doesn't feed the Food Processing Plant, you pretty well have your answer.

My guess would be that goods require the catchment area of one of your stations in order to transport goods, and since I presume industries don't have catchment areas, one industry can't supply another one directly. Another reason why this probably won't work is because it's the routes that you setup to get Livestock from a farm to a Food Processing Plant that triggers the Farm to produce. Your lines enable demand to flow from towns to factories to raw resource providers.

In addition, it's not enough to have a station that picks up and distributes goods, as goods will only make a single hop via catchment area before having to be loaded onto a vehicle to make a second hop.

[Vimpster]

Much as SBGaming stated, products can only make a single hop before requiring transport on a vehicle in order to make another hop once unloaded. Nothing will jump straight from one industry into another.

As such you can have a single truck just load up and do a loop and unload at the same spot in order to facilitate the second hop needed to get into the other factory. This won't likely be profitable though, unless you are playing on easy perhaps.

[praet]

Thanks a lot for the quick responses, that confirms my suspicions. I had a few of these constellations appear as working but I guess that was some weird auto route via a couple consecutive truck lines that allowed the resource buildings to start producing.

[chrisasnyder]

I had tried this on a map, put tools/machines, goods factory and steel all together with a station to service brining in the materials and moving out the products. Since steel didn't jump to the factoryies, I setup a short truck line for the steel. The problem became the trucks simply couldn't move the steel needed for these plants, so I needed to use rail, which was a problem because of the close proximity. I suggest some distance between providers to allow room for high capcity lines.