How to set up a 4 platform station

[Kelvin]

Need help. I am trying to use 4 platform stations with freight and passenger being kept to their own lines between stations, Point to point works OK. Signal control with way points works OK. Using a controlled maintanence station in between messed up the lines , I think. Perhaps just have another station just for freight would be better or even warehouses. Any suggestions

[Thineboot]

When using a maintenance station you have to use way points before and after it to keep the lines separated.
You've came up with the better solutions of using dedicated freight stations and warehouses by yourself :)

If you wanna increase profit per freight car you can use said freight stations for food delivery using refrigerator cars and warehouses for non-food freight. That way you can further speed up your passenger and mail lines by restricting them thus getting more express lines. You'll end up with two or three dedicated networks. As of now it works for me as expected in scenarios. I suspect using refrigerator cars may not worth using in longer (100 year) free games cause money is only a problem in early game as far as my experience goes.

[Kelvin]

Yes I think I will keep freight and passengers apart on my main stations. The jury is still out on signalled controlled stations

[Thineboot]

Why do you use maintenance stations? Because maintenance blocks stations without signal control.
Where can you use maintenance stations? They have a large footprint like signal controlled stations/warehouses.
How many lines can you sever without interruption with a warehouse, in and out?
Are you shipping only 8 cars freight trains or are 0 cars acceptable to keep the flow running uninterrupted?

Remember you can always rebuild your initial stations when money is available and the station starts to get overcrowded. Rebuilding warehouses is a bit more tricky but still possible if planned ahead.

[Kelvin]

I was just messing around in sandbox mode just to see if they are worth the hassle, but like you said maintenance stations are useless. I usually start with double stations and use point to point.Also if a warehouse needed early on and is cost effected I might use the double single controlled one. I generally play free mode and just suck it and see

[Thineboot]

I haven't said maintenance stations are useless. There may be special circumstance where they could be useful. Ok, ok, that sounds like useless but still... Lets say they are rarely useful depending on your personal playing style. If anyone using them frequently I'd be glad to learn how and when they turn out to be better than not using them.

Playing in manual pause mode I start with the least expenses and expand/replace stations when necessary. Unfortunately point-to-point is the way you have to play RE regarding passenger and mail. Food and Good on the other hand is well served with a good network. Luckily there is no blueprint for different maps and circumstances :)

[chaney]

I agree with Thineboot as usual.

Signal Control is expensive and ends up being less efficient. Point to point wins.

The Maintenance Stations are used only in niche situations. If you have a very busy Station, say at a City you are trying to grow insanely large, and the Stations at the other end of the lines are also busy, you don't want to do maintenance in any of those Stations. Position the Maintenance Station on the ENTRY to the busy Station, but ONLY CONNECT IT TO THE INBOUND RAIL(S)! Since the trains only flow through in one direction, they don't block each other causing undue delays, and trains not needing maintenance can bypass those getting repairs.

If you want to specify Platforms at the City Station, you can build multiple track out of the Maintenance Station and use Waypoints to specify track, or just specify the Platform directly.

If needed, leave space before the City to allow congestion on, say, freight lines, to not block express lines.

Putting it on the outbound line is probably ok, but if really congested you can get 4 trains being worked on at once which may cause a backup, which is more serious than causing the same backup on the inbound lines because you can have a cue between Maintenance and the City to serve as an accumulator if it is really over-loaded. That keeps the City Station at maximum capacity. Outbound blockage without enough space will leave trains idling in the City.

[Kelvin]

Thats what I like about this game, there are many ways to achieve your end goal.

[Thineboot]

Thanks, chaney... and your guide has just got another handy part :)

Have you ever asked Unerde to add it... never mind, found it. Beneath three of six yt videos a guy had to post each in his own post...

For normal stations signal-control isn't expensive. Just calculate the additional rails you get for 20k. And you can serve four cities while still providing maintenance for all lines. But replacing a small station is only possible in manual and normal pause modes for those who have the patience to undergo such tasks ;) At the point when two tracks are not enough anymore money isn't an issue any more. Otherwise I'd replace the normal signal-controlled with a large station.

[bluemonkey]

I found a possible use for Maintenance Stations (MS): at intersections:

The Problem:
I was playing the gold rush scenario and was trying to build up the south side of the state (LA, SD, Yuma, Kingman, Tuscon). There's one nearby wood between Yuma & Tuscon and I had been running 1 platform per city (Kingman/LA have to share though). I'm trying to run meat long distance up to Bodie & wheat/beer long distance to all points south: every southern city is inundated with bypasses, mergers and strategically placed supply towers, the last thing I want is another dedicated train line just to handle wood (but need it for growth!). So I replace my wood station with a warehouse to stockpile other trade goods for distribution and it suddenly gets very busy.

The Maintenance Station Solution:
I basically have a four way intersection from Kingman to the Yuma-Tuscon trunk line arriving to a supply tower just outside of the wood warehouse. Then I realize MS! By dumping the supply tower for an MS, my 4 way merger can happen seamlessly. Two lines on each side for the Yuma-Tuscon trunk; two lines on the westside for the connection to Kingman; two lines on the east side for the warehouse. MS handles the supply tower function, it handles the switching for the intersection; it handles the worst of the maintenance on the long haul traffic (relieving the busy warehouse & Tuscon); and added bonus: the local traffic doesn't HAVE to stop and wait for any of these shenanigans.

[Locomotive]

Am I the only one that have good experience with maintenance stations? I ALWAYS use it between my intercity routes. I usually have 4 rail lines going into the station and 4 out, with 2 designated one-way for cargo and 2 one-way passenger and never really have an issue with path finding. I just set passenger route from a specific non-signalling station(i.e.platform line 1) to a specific non-signalling station(i.e. the other platform line 1) for cargo. Then I repeat with passenger for platform line 2. I noticed they will criss-cross and by-pass the trains at the maintenance stations as needed. Therefore it's never jammed at those maintenance stations, especially at the city stations. Even when I added more routes to the maintenance stations from other locations, the trains work out fine and hardly ever stopped to wait to pass.

You can even use this as an alternative to bridges and tunnels if you needed to cross existing lines. It's much cheaper than extra bridges/tunnels while providing pit stops for ONLY those needed trains. This avoid the trains on the same line to wait for each other if you have a lot of cargo going and they all have to be backed up if one is refueling.

I really think they pay for themselves because I tend to build repair stations at the cities plus the supply towers anyways. The cost ended up being more in many cases and causing a lot more jams because trains have to wait for each other.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1836112999

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1836112932

Signalling Warehouses can be used similarly with supply towers shortly away from the exit of the warehouse on both sides and repair center at the warehouse. Although I do find placing water towers further away helps with congestion

[chaney]

That's a nice post with lots of good thinking, thanks!

I have seen busy sections end up operating with lower throughput by adding a Maintenance Station, but for low or moderate traffic they should be ok. Whatever works for you :)

The use of one as a discount tunnel is a powerful trick. I've kept that one under my hat because it seems like an abusive exploit that I don't enjoy using, but if others want to play that way, let 'em abuse away!

[Locomotive]

The only thing that can help with busy intersections is more rail lines, not a fault of the maintenance station. If you use water towers and repair stations at the cities, you'll end up with too much congestion as well. I use this method and the non-signalling platforms for cities to minimize congestion at the cities. Moreover, this allow you to have dedicated express lanes and slower freight lanes going to the same city.

I don't believe it's a cheat or a cheap trick because you can already do the same with normal tracks and have them criss-cross each other without the use of tunnels/bridges. That just requires a larger area to work with. Besides, weren't some stations historically were just pitstops to allow trains to refuel/repair and then change their routes?

[Thineboot]

Neither do I think it's a cheap trick. On the contrary, I think it's a legal, probably intended, expensive trick.

Maintenance station is worth it's money. For 200,000 you'll get 80,000 maintenance, 30,000 supply tower and about 60,000 in tracks and earthworks. Add a second supply tower as it can serve up to 4 trains simultaneously and you'll end up with 200,000 in a compact 52 km long station.

Maintenance station is much longer than any other more economical built crossing. Besides the direct crossing which has to separate parallel tracks you can cross parallel lines regularly on ~ 16-17 km using (temporary) supply towers as helpers: https://i.postimg.cc/L6GvV6cj/maintenance-vs-supply.png Using supply towers brings the tracks on the same level avoiding any unwanted incline which could even prevent this type of cheap crossing otherwise. Once the crossing is done you can get rid of them and any track you don't want shortening the actual crossing even more.

I agree that using dedicated maintenance stations instead of maintenance in stations will speed up the flow. They won't cost you more than individual maintenance and supply towers as pointed out but avoid blocking tracks in stations due to maintaining trains - if you're not playing the Engineer. He offers free maintenance everywhere which speeds up maintenance because you'll maintain trains literally in every station which has free capacity to do so.

A pro for maintenance stations is that you can avoid using supply towers on the average city-to-city line where supply hungry trains would block others even using normal mode instead of realistic (see Expresszüge).

A con for maintenance stations is that you can easily end up with steep inclines on one or both ends when the terrain isn't flat enough on 52 km length. That's the huge drawback why I'm not using them at the moment. But I'll try them again when the situation favors them. So thanks for bringing them up again, Locomotive.

Note that miles in RE are ~ 1.925 km, not the expected 1.609344 km (see 1 Kalypso mile ~ 1.925 km.)

[chaney]

Poor communication on my part - I intended to voice distaste for the method of using one instead of a very expensive set of tunnels/earthworks. It doesn't come up much, but this kind of trick can work and since the earth flattening comes for free can save a lot of money. Thineboot's method of building, running parallel to, then removing a Supply Tower to convince the game to build a deeper cut rather than a tunnel seems like a fair work-around for an excessive limit in the track building mechanics, although I suspect it does discount the nominal cost of digging the cut. That's fairly minor to get the layout you want, while tunnels are $$ so feel more like cheating. Personal preferences, enjoy.

I'll stick with the opinion that 2-way Maintenance Station tracks will have low throughput if connected to busy tracks running both ways ... but connected to only 1 direction of track, that bottleneck isn't a problem until you really overload and so they can be very practical.

[Thineboot]

The method I described doesn't allow you to go deeper than a tunnel. Supply towers can only be placed regularly. They are only about 5 km long which may - I'm not sure it does(!) - result in a little reduction of earthworks but that was never intended. Bringing the crossing tracks on the same level allows trains to use higher speeds during crossing as there is no extra slope but two curves.

Most of the time real crossings have acute angles witch makes bridges the better choice. While the first track costs more the parallel has normal costs, the distance is shorter and unless you can't manage to keep the incline low the trip is still faster than using this longer approach.

One con I've missed to point out is that you can't replace two maintenance in stations with one maintenance station. While this may seem obvious to me chaney has described the use of double maintenance stations before

Originally posted by chaney:

...

(check it out, it's worth reading the whole post.) In case you're running a network you could theoretically place as many maintenance stations in between the cities and save the supply towers. But keep in mind that while you move the maintenance from the cities to the dedicated station they would have to play the role of supply stations at the same time. In the end it would create a bottleneck and you're just shifting the problem. Writing this and thinking again about them it seems more and more that they could serve better on longer connections as additional places for maintenance. Not replacing the one you add to stations and warehouses but in the way chaney has described there usage before (see prior link.) More external spots for maintenance should speed up the flow for busy stations.