ADVANCED TRAIN SYSTEMS; Deadlocks, Depots & Train Limits | Factorio Master Class

Hello. Hopefully someone will see this. Been playing factorio for years and I love this idea. Problem with LTN that later in game just starts to fail and haven't a clue why. perhaps to much. MY mega base does get overwhelming and i got trains going to stations that don't need supplies, and items mixing at stops, and fluids all over. Basically LTN fails later in game. But now there is another issue and that is my Mall. I like having a place to go to resupply on items and crafts. But I hate having a train for each resource. Anyone help me on how to send a train to a supply location when supplies are needed. And no, turn off and on stations will not help. If the station turns off then the rest of the network wont be able to go there for there supplies. I basically wont my mall to have little or just one train gettings supplies when my stop is low for the mall.

Your making your own problem with the depot/waiting station. With the depot you have 4 trains running to 3 stations when it should only be 2 for the 3 stations with waiting you don't give trains a direct route to all waiting stations from any load station in the vicinity. Also you can make resource specific depot or waiting and they will never get full unless you have more trains than stations.

your problem is that the waiting/depot stations are separate stops. give them the same name as intended stops then make the station extremely unattractive by placing a manual dead train at it, and a dozen dummy stops in front of it, and a red rail signal in front of those. make a giant stacker in front of that.

if every station has a zero limit for whatever reason, ONLY then will a train bother to visit the depot. then the trains will just pile in the stacker and revaluate every 5 seconds, once a real station opens up any active train at the front of the stacker will repath to the open station.

This is basically just making a set of dummy outposts with the same name as real outposts, that pile so many negative multipliers to pathing that no train will ever go there unless there's no other option, if the trains are stopped at chain signals they will attempt to find a repath (including a new same name station) every 5 seconds.

you need a stacker large enough to accommodate every train that might ever use the depot. this combined with keeping every station to a minimum limit of 1 hasn't failed me yet.

When the trains are fucked because I'm trying to get more resources in and layouts aren't working is my bloody problem @_@

Why can't you just use the first design but not disable the train stops? have only 1 train going to load/unload and the rest of the trains idle.

why bother turning off the Loading stations in the first example? isnt it good that the train is always able to go back to its home and not cause and deadlock?

I know this is an older series, but I'm sure it still gets views, so gonna put this comment. I know a lot of people are going to think I'm wrong, and that's fine, but after 3,000 hours in factorio I have learned 1 thing. the issue with your deadlocks is NOT supply and demand. You should never ever put dynamic limits on your loading stations. if a loading station has a stacker that can hold 3 trains then that station should be hard limited to 3. it makes sure that all empty trains can sit at the loader even if there isn't enough supply to fill them and keeps them from getting stuck at the unload stations. had you designed your loading stations with hard limits instead of all that dynamic limit shenanigans, you would not have had this issue. I have never had this happen because I always set dynamic limits on the unloaders and hard limits on the loaders.

Trains skip disabled stations, by dynamicly enabling/disabling depots you can control the amount of trains serving you network, if you want more info on that i can provide a blueprint. but as you mentioned in that video already it would be only a bandaid for a broken arm keeping your base going while you fix the underlying problem

Do you have any designs that allow for a double headed train? So its just one track, where a train goes directly into its unloading/loading station, and then immediately can get offonto the track again? The station would be directly perpendicular to the track but I don't know how to setup to signals for it

i was trying my time at amegabase with these designs...
and i finally found out the problem you had with trains getting stuck. you only had part of the solution by saing to add more ressources by having more outposts... the reality is... your outpost reguardless of how big they are, cannot support your actual design plans. as an exemple... i took a 10 lane outpost with 140mil ressources... all of those drills, with speed modules will only get out 11k per minutes. you set the trains to be full at 16k, which is 8 wagons times 2k ressources... so basically your ore patches can get out an entire train only in about 1 minutes and about 20 seconds. trains takes no longer then about 20 seconds to reach destination and back. yet you keep on splitting your ressources onto two train systems... which means it takes two times more to fill in that 16k limit. in your current train system, there is no way your base can manage that fast... basically you expendaded your base too fast and ended up always missing ressources because none of the ressources were fast enough to fill out a train to begin with. thus trains gets the "destination full" which isn't a bug... you literally have no destination ready to deploy. thats why yougetthe destination full.... sure adding more ressources solve half that problem... but... you're adding to the problem by adding more trains as you still require only 1 train per outpost and even there the train can only be filled every 1 minute and a half or so...

so whats the solution ?!!
less wagons to fill, diminish the number of trains by diminishing how much they can fill up.
i'd say in your megabase design... L-CCCC-L trains would be more efficient and the destination full problem would become much less visible. yes, my solution is to half your designs... things like circuits are fine... i mean as long as ressources gets in, those trains will fill up tight... but basic ressources... there is a limit at how much they can drill out of the ground and thus you cannot go beyond that limit. you have to follow it. so if you fill up 1 train of 16k ores in 1 minute and a half. by reducing train maximum load by half, then those trains should be filled up and ready to go in 45 seconds. 45 seconds is much better a time from ore to plates and back. by that time it should be ready. otherwise that train goes to plates then tell you destination full for like 45 seconds before it decided to go on again. so there you go, the deestination full problem is because your trains are going too fast for the drills to follow them.

the reality is... there is no way to solve the train problem to begin with. for the train system is not based in reality. in reality we have train depots where trains gets assembled and desassemble when they are not needed anymore. leaving the network with next to no congestion because there is no trains on the network. in factorio we can't do that... i've been using train depots to stop trains and literally removing them from the network, but makes throughput less because your train now has a third stop in its route. not to mention you have to constructs such places by about 4. one in each corner of your base. so there is no way to make thorughput and network congestion better. fact of the matter, in real life we don't have trains that have only 8 cars... trains can go a mile long. in rel life no trains turns 90 degrees like they do in factorio... fact of the matter, in real life, trains aren'T made for such small bases... even your "megabase" is still smaller then a military base. you dont see trains on military bases... they use cars and trucks to do their lifting. trains are only a good thing when you intend to go 100 miles away and more. sorry but we're not even close to doing that in factorio. not even by a stretch...

so to me the advice should be...
this is not reallife, this is factorio. the destination full cannot be solved without sacrificng the through put.
in real life, through put doesn't matter to begin with...

In scenario 1 trains should not be stuck in that deadlock permanently. Your stations that are blocked should become unblocked eventually as they would at some point have enough resources to open. Unless you have too many dead mines in which case you are way behind on opening new mining opportunities. I have taken to putting speakers on mine to alert to needing to relocate miners

Move your "waiting station" to a "spur" (out of the loop, a dead-end)... wire a single pole to it, then enable "Read Train Count" and "Enable/Disable"... set the enable condition to C=0.

This works because as a train paths to leave the unloading, it tries to go to the Waiting station, immediately disables it (by setting the C value if itself), and then paths to the loading station.

The benefit of this is you only need ONE waiting station on the entire network.

I just setup my stations to always request at least 1 train and leave enough room for a train that is waiting for the station to clear.

it's not a bug, it's an opportunity to make a smarter network more satisfying.

Concerning the depot thing. Couldn’t you add an exit station with no conditions after every station stack?
Since trains path to the closest open station doing that with no train limit set could prevent the freeze provided you aren’t critically over provisioning the network.

Has anyone done a rail system with three tracks?

Long story short: You must have 4 stations in a loop: Unloading, Out, Loading, In.

Imagine you have an UNLOADING depot that has 4 stations for Iron. Each station has a demand of for example 5 trains. So we have 20 trains in a loop. Build an OUT depot right after UNLOADING depot, with a few stations, so that they have enough place to collect all the 20 trains (Ex: 2 station with a pocket for 10-trains length) in case if you run out of ore and trains have nowhere to go. Then your UNLOADING stations will be free. UNLOADING depot must be connected to the OUT depot in such a way, that a train can get from any UNLOADING station to any OUT station. In the situation I am describing you can just connect 4 UNL railways into one path, and then split it to each OUT station.
You should build an IN depot with the same logic as OUT, right before the UNL depot. The connection must again allow "any-to-any" path. This will allow you to store all the trains bug-safely in the situation when you have enough ore but the UNL depot does not need it. You can save some space by making it with the capacity of "20 minus number_of_UNL_stations" trains, i.e. 20-4.
The problem here is that each similar loop must have unique name for its IN, UNL and OUT stations. IN1, UNL1, OUT1 etc. In this case you will never have a situation when one UNL has 60 trains, the other has 0.
Of course you can build two huge OUT and IN depots for all your UNL depots, set a dynamic demand, but it will increase traffic.
I came to the conclusion that It is better to create more trains for a system, but every train must have its constant IN, UNL and OUT stations. It is better when they spend most of the time between these three stations than go and wait somwhere in the system.
So instead one UNL depot you create a chane of 3 depot. In fact it won't increase space significantly, but will decrease traffic a lot. Every train travels frome "home" to the nearest LOADING station, and "passes freely without any delay or hinderance". ;)
Have a nice train guys! ;)