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Railway

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For the research see Railway (research)

The Railway is one of the big transport methods in Factorio. Although the installation of such an network is sometimes complicated and takes a lot of resources and space, it is especially over large distances more efficient and faster than belts and robot logistics.

Besides the use as transportation medium it must be said here, that driving trains is really fun. :)

Railway isn't learned in an instant! It takes some minutes to learn the basics. After one hour you should be able to automate your transport. For the expert knowledge how to manage a big network it takes some hours to really understand train signals and schedules.

Beginner

This section covers how to build track, assemble trains and get moving. This enables manual transports over large distances using trains.

Railway/Tutorials
Sometimes a picture/video says more than a thousand words.
Railway/Do not cross the tracks
A train is very fast, take care! Entering/exiting a moving train is possible, but dangerous.
Vehicle/Train/Defence
Defend yourself as trains are a priority target of Enemies.

Tracks

Composition of rails to form a 90 degree turn.
Straight rail Curved rail |-

Switches, crossings, everything has to be built out of the two basic elements (straight/curve) manually. According to FFF #113/#114 the 0.13 will already include a build-by-drag feature to make building tracks easier and faster.

Raster of tracks

Rail items can be placed in a two-square-raster only, the tracks needs two Tiles width. For an advanced gameplay (for example if you make plans for a train station, before you researched trains) it is important, that you can place tracks only on even tile-coordinates. You can see the coordinates of the tile you are moving with the cursor, if you turn on the Debug mode, select "show-tile-grid" or/and "show-detailed-info".

Curves

To do a 90 degree turn 2 Curved rails and 1 Straight rail is needed. The Straight rail has to be placed in diagonal orientation to fit the gap between the two Curved rails.

Switches

File:Rail-switch-example-1.png
Composition of rails to form switches, straight and diagonal.
  • There is no optical sign for a working switch. You simply have to place a Curved rail overlapping on a Straight rail (or vice versa) to form a switch. In other words: You can create 3-way-switches at nearly every point of your track by mixing curves with straigt rails.
  • The crossing of two straight tracks is not usable as switch, but they are connecting the blocks. See Railway network/Block and Signals.
  • It is no problem to create parallel tracks, but it's currently a big problem to switch from one track to the other parallel track, if there is no space between them: The curves doesn't enable it. So it is eventually a good idea to create parallel tracks, by leaving two tiles space (size of one track-width) between them. This enables also to create left-hand sided traffic, because you can place the signals and train stops between the tracks.

Other


Trains

Diesel locomotive Cargo wagon |-

After you managed you build some tracks its time to get moving. Simply select the locomotive and place it onto the tracks. Open the gui of the locomotive, you should see the schedule menu. Press the button in top left corner to switch to the locomotive screen and insert some Fuel. Enter the locomotive like any other vehicle. Press 'forward' to accelerate, 'backward' to brake. 'Left' and 'Right' are to choose the direction at switches, BEWARE this is relative to trains driving direction, not to direction on screen.

As seen on the locomotive screen, it doesn't has an inventory itself. To transport items Cargo wagons have to be attached. The cargo wagons can be filled manually or by adjacent inserters. This is everything needed to do manual transports. The following "advanced" section will cover the topics needed to make your trains running automatically.

Advanced

This section covers items used to make trains automatically transport items between stations. To fully understand you should be familiar with the Beginner Section.

Automated rail transportation

A very minimal station.
Train Station with multiple Train stops and Rail signals to allow operation of multiple trains on single track.
Train stop |-
Train stop
The item that marks the position for the locomotive to stop.
Train Station
The complete facility around one or more Train stops including un/loading machinery, defense structures, refueling/repair installations.

Rail signals

Rail signal Rail chain signal |-

To make the understanding of Railsignal and their behavior and effects easier we start with some definitions:

Rail segment
A piece of track. There are just Straight rail and Curved rail.
Segment
A single path of continuous rails, a track without intersections or switches. This becomes important when you want to use Signals. You can see the number of the current segment when hovering over the track.
Block
A set of segments. Every connected segment belongs to one block, no matter whether a train can drive on it or not, and even if it can be driven only in one direction (for example a joining switch: the other segment of the switch belongs to the same block!). You can see the current block numbers of a rail piece in the info section. See also this forum post for a good explanation about blocks.

Researching Rail signals enables to drive more trains.

Expert

This section contains further links to in-depth knowledge.

About Trains

About train stations and stops

Tipps & Tricks

Relationship to OpenTTD

Factorio's railway system works basically exactly the block signals in Open Traffic Tycoon Deluxe. If you ever played that game you will find some elements also in Factorio. If not, you can learn from their documentation.