Why vanilla trains don’t work

[Jeff]

When a car makes a delivery it only has a few stacks of inventory in it. Even the Mk 5 belt is too slow to fill up the car unless you hold the train up until the station fills.

With a modded game, the belts carry much more resources and fill up the station quickly.

[DrNewcenstein]

Feed train platforms from full containers only. Don't link the container to the platform until it's full. Cars hold about half as much as they should, so a big container will hold double, and keep the freight cars full.

[XistenZ]

That's an odd statement.

First, saying trains don't work when you mean the carts.
Second, how fast you fill the cart is irrelevant? Depending on the trains route the cart may or may not be filled. If the train has a route that takes 20 seconds then maybe not use a train here.
Third, the trains can be configured to wait at the station until they're full.

If you simply want to shine light unto a "problem" to promote the idea of faster belts, we all want faster belts.

[LostME]

There are problems with the game engine, so even 780 belt can lose items. So enjoy the mods, but what does the trains have to do with it?

[DivineEvil]

Train stations have two input and output hatches. You can use both simultaneously. Given the capacity of T4 belts at the train stage, you can have issues only in two cases - either its a problem of production of resources being loaded, or you're using trains on a very short track, or both.

Trains are intended to at very least cross over to other biomes, and attaching multiple cars allow you to transport multiple different resources without using smart splitters. Essentially you can build mining/refining hubs around the entire map and use trains to bring them to the production facilities. Within the boundaries of a single biome, Trucks are a better fit.

[Jeff]

What do trains got to do with it? My game is vanilla. Have a factory that has a high demand for encased industrial beams (making heavy modular frames). When the train arrives, the manufacturers run for a minute at best and shut down for six. So what is the real number for how many per minute? Not very much.

[DerFinneAT]

This still doesn't explain anything at all.
Either you are able to produce 7 minutes worth of industrial beams on one site, and distribute the production on enough cars to get 100% transported per trip to the other, or you don't.

Trains don't change that equation in any direction.

So you mentioned having a stalled production on the demanding beam side.
If you beam-production side also stalls, it is a question of how you setup the whole loading infrastructure.
If it does not stall you demand outpaces your production - na matter how fast any belt would be.

Maybe some words of clarification would help us to understand where you are aiming at, or what your actual problem is.

[Man's Best Friend]

You have a supposed train cycle of 7 minutes. Let's cut off a minute for loading and unloading, during which product cannot be moved into or out of the station. A Mk5 belt running at ~90% capacity (700/min) will deliver 4200 pieces. Since we're talking about industrial beams, that's 42 full stacks. A single freight car has an inventory of 32. Yet you're saying that your train only delivers "a few stacks" at a time. The problem isn't the train, or the belt. It's the fact that you're massively underproducing industrial beams for your demand.

Also, yes, I've been a bit loose with the numbers, but they're all lowballing. The actual throughput should be higher, not that it matters though because even with lowballing we're looking at more than a single car's capacity loaded with a single belt in the time stated. The problem isn't the train, or the belts. It's the fact that your factory is completely out of balance.

[Jeff]

The beams are made trying to get to the shipping station, but can't be loaded into the station fast enough. The train comes in, takes whatever is there and leaves. This is why I can't get much at the delivery end. If there were only more inputs. Sure, I could have multiple freight platforms shipping a tiny amount each, but then why is there so much space in each one that I'll never fill?

[The Big Brzezinski]

So increase throughput by adding a car to the train and a platform to each station. Trains are scalable.

[XistenZ]

Originally posted by Jeff:

The beams are made trying to get to the shipping station, but can't be loaded into the station fast enough. The train comes in, takes whatever is there and leaves. This is why I can't get much at the delivery end. If there were only more inputs. Sure, I could have multiple freight platforms shipping a tiny amount each, but then why is there so much space in each one that I'll never fill?

It fills 1560 items per minute, that's quite a volume. Again, if you choose to have a very short route of course it won't fill. It takes maybe 4 minutes to fill it (if I remember correctly that a station holds 32 slots).

Actually not sure what you expect. Should a station duplicate items? Produce more items if you need more items

[Jeff]

Understand that as I said in the last post that you skipped over without reading fully. Instead of having multiple weak stations, I would rather have fewer strong stations which I cannot get playing a vanilla game (refer to the title of this post).

[The Big Brzezinski]

Ah, it's an aesthetic issue then, not a practical one. That's what was confusing me.

[XistenZ]

Originally posted by Jeff:

Understand that as I said in the last post that you skipped over without reading fully. Instead of having multiple weak stations, I would rather have fewer strong stations which I cannot get playing a vanilla game (refer to the title of this post).

No I read it fully, maybe you should try to do the same.
Of course I did tell you that in a post I never made earlier that you didn't bother to read.

But really, what is the purpose of this thread? You just want to tell people that you like using mods because you can't be bothered to use the tools available? It sounds more like you're confused about throughput and that's what we were trying to adress.

[Man's Best Friend]

Originally posted by XistenZ:

It takes maybe 4 minutes to fill it (if I remember correctly that a station holds 32 slots).

2 minutes at maximum fill rate. 4 if you're only using one belt. Which just further illustrates that this isn't a problem with trains or belts. The only "problem" here would be deciding to use a train for such a small route.

Actually, digging deeper into this, to fill a train car with industrial beams in 2 minutes would absolutely dominate production across the entire map in regards to its input. It can't even be done using the default recipes without modding the miners (which itself would require faster belts). I'm seeing numbers like needing 39 oil extractors to make petroleum coke for coke steel ingots (there are 30 oil wells available), or 52 Mk3 extractors mining coal (50 available) for standard ingots. Looks like it could be done with the solid steel ingot, but that's still over half your coal production going to making industrial beams alone.

So, yeah. This just goes back to this isn't a problem with trains, it's a problem with your setup.

[The Big Brzezinski]

I remember at one point, I had a station with a moderate amount of traffic just daisy chain its unloading platforms together. They essentially fed all their contents into the same two belts and sorting array. Since the traffic wasn't real high, it was good enough for the job.

Trains really are a flexible and effective logistics solution. With a well developed railroad, any two points on the map may as well be adjacent.