Compact, balanced train unloading station.
Posted Nov 28, 2016, 10:39 PM UTC
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It looks like the outer two inserters have priority over the four inner ones.
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I played a little over the holiday and came up with this compact design that I hadn't seen anywhere else. It only requires 5 spaces perpendicular to the track, which is optimal for lane-balanced output. This allows many parallel stations to be placed as close as possible to one another, like this.
The design utilizes the property of underground conveyor endpieces that they do not form a bend when an adjacent conveyor inserts into them sideways. It also unloads the left and right chests to the side, and bridges the 4 in the middle. This was necessary because there is no way (to my knowledge) to join the 6 adjacent lanes with only two vertical spaces. It splits the problem up into joining the middle four lanes (do-able with 2 vertical spaces) and the left and right lanes (can be bridged over). Because of the bridge, this design is only suitable for single-cargo car trains. Note that single car trains can completely occupy both blue belts (top and bottom) if a full train is unloaded every 50 seconds (for 100 stack items like iron plates) or 25 seconds (for 50 stack items like iron ore). For more than 2 blue belts of unloading speed, you can add more stations.
This is not completely chest-balanced, but it is balanced in the sense that it will keep the blue belt at capacity until all the chests are emptied (sorry if this is confusing). You could make it chest-balanced pretty easily using a loop-back on the right side. This would grant you somewhat faster train unloading times if chests are full, but not belt throughput. Here is the balanced version, but it has its own drawbacks (has a longer trail-off and start-up period).
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I always enjoy seeing new designs.
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I really like the design, and you can get around the "single car" limitation by stacking 2 or 4 stops (assuming you have straight run-off past your station)...
Alternatively you might be able to pull one-sided and alternate the top and bottom designs per car...
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Alternatively you might be able to pull one-sided and alternate the top and bottom designs per car...
What do you mean by this? One-sided?
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[deleted]
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Am I the only person who really dislikes using underground belts for stopping one side of a regular belt? It just seems... wrong to me.
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I don't think he's using them to "block" one half of the belt, but rather to get around the connection logic of belts.
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I understand that. Using them for anything other than going underground to me seems like an un-intended side effect of how they were programmed.
What would be really nice is if you could tell individual belts to not automatically connect to neighbours.
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This will work well if it's just 1 cargo/train. But 1 cargo train throughput is just too low, even mid-size bases will need more than that.
With this setup, instead of making longer trains, you add more stations. Every station can fill two blue belts to capacity, so a single station is enough until late game. I think people underestimate the capacity of a single cargo.
There are tradeoffs to both strategies. The advantage of single cargo train is that they move faster, stations are smaller, trains pass through junctions quicker (blocking each other less), gridlock is easier to prevent, and if you use double-ended trains, stations are simpler and more uniform (fuel always in the same place).
I like the unloading setup, but I think longer trains are still a better option. I guess it just comss down to personal preference. Just adding more trains and more stations will get out of hand very quickly for anything more than a medium sized base if your going with a 1 wagon train.
Even though the station can fill two blue belts, the ore from one wagon would only keep those Belts saturated for about 25 seconds. So you would need a new train coming in every 25 seconds or less to keep 2 blue belts saturated. Considering that even a medium to large size base typically has 4 lines of copper and iron, that is 8 blue belts to keep saturation. That is a massive amount of trains and stations required if using 1 cargo wagon.
Now I want to wire 3+ one wagon stations in series; with the trains stopping at whichever one has the lowest stock in the boxes.
I last played before you could wire stations. Is it really possible to tell them which one to go to?
Ya I agree, it depends what tradeoffs you want to make. One thing about scaling is that it is easier to add stations than extend the length of existing stations. It is indeed a crazy amount of trains zipping around late-game but one unload every 25 seconds is very do-able. Alternatively, you can use two-cargo size trains from mining to ore processing, and one-cargo size trains to take the smelted materials (stacks of 100) to manufacturing.
Do you have any links to good loading designs for 4+ cargo wagons? I didn't see any around when looking.
Yeah true. And I agree that it is easier to add stations than to extend length of existing stations, however you shouldn't really need to extend the length of stations if you design your system for the future from the get-go. For example, 2-4-2 trains work very well even up into the mega base scale, so if you design that way to start with then you shouldn't have to redesign stations.
Sure, there are several I can think of. :) If you are open to using some very simple circuitry, there is the MadZuri smart loader, and unloader design that can be made for any number of wagons. I'm sure it can be found in several places, but the main ones I know of are in the Workshop videos that he and I did for both. They can be found here: Unloader
Loader
If you don't want to use circuits, there are plenty of ways to unload 4+ wagons with belts, it just gets a bit more messy and takes more room usually. I can find/come up with some belt ones tomorrow if you would like some of those. So let me know. :) Personally, if I'm not gonna use robots to unload, I much prefer those smart designs over just plain belts and splitters to balance it.
Loaders and Warehouses NP, ezpz
Train friction is dominated by form drag on the front and rear of the train, so you gain a lot by using longer trains with at least two locomotives. The top speed of a 1-1-0 is 258.5 km/hr. Compare to 258.8 km/hr for a 2-20-0. Of course, that will take forever to get up to speed, so you probably want to use a 2-16-0 or a 2-8-0, either of which is capable of hitting the train speed limit, 259.2 km/hr.
Gridlock is easiest to prevent when there are few trains on the tracks.
You can just add more engines to longer trains. My train with three engines and 12 cars is just as fast as a train with one engine and four, with the advantage of less train congestion since there is less stop/go when you have less trains.
Your design is cool though, I like it.
You can double that just by reversing the design by 180 degrees.
I'm afraid you can't. Wagons have only one space between them. This (though very cool) setup reqires 2 on each side.
not if you reverse it so that it travels towards the loco's
not true, the station sticks two tiles out on each side (the inserters on the first and last chests)
It can be easily remade. Just place the leftmost insterter in line with others and do just minor adjustments to the belt pathing. It's a matter of changing an area of 2x3.