Cargo wagon
Template:Machinery The Cargo wagon is used in conjunction with Diesel locomotives to form trains for the Railway network.
Please look into Vehicle/Train/Wagon for general information about this.
A wagon is used to transport items by train and can be filled/unfilled at train stations like a chest, but with many more inserters at the same time. Up to 12 inserters per wagon are possible (from both sides). The Inserter item stack size is important to fill the wagon fast!
Stack limitation
Wagons have a stack limitation. Use it to limit the number of items, that can be inserted. This is useful, if you want to limit the number of transported items for some cases.
Stack filter
Each stack in the cargo wagon can be filtered. This works in the same way as with your quick bar (the toolbelt), default is pressing middle mouse button.
This can be used to transport some different items in one wagon, without overfilling it. Best example is for transporting empty and full oil barrels in one wagon and at the train stations the barrels are exchanged by smart inserters.
See for example Tired of babysitting expansions? Auto-supply w/ trains!.
Compressing items
A cargo wagon can be filled with 2000 items of ores (copper, iron, coal...) or 4000 item of processed plates (copper plates, iron plates, steel), which makes it a eventually a useful strategy to process the iron "in place", where you mine it, before you transport it to your factory. There are also other strategies of compressing the cargo before load.
Positions of wagons and inserters
The wagons can be filled/emptied at train stations and you need to keep in mind, that the inserter positions differs a bit, depending on, if you load vertical or horizontal.
Using as big chest ("multi-inserter chest")
It is possible to use the cargo wagon as a "big chest": Place rails, put a wagon on it and inserters around. The advantage of this construction is
- you can feed/unload the wagon with much more inserters (from/to a belt), and from here into/from another stack based system (a chest, assembly). This goes around the limitations of inserter stack size bonus.
- You can "transport" items over up to 14 (?) tiles (size of wagon plus length of long arm inserters).
See
- Solar panel factory
- Cargo wagon sourced RGB circuits production facility
- Mass production with ZERO belts and robots
http://www.factorioforums.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=3537
Using the wagon as storage chest enables to have more throughput at small space:
Here in detail how this works: Many inserters put items into the wagons and only some out. This is only possible because Inserter_item_stack_size is researched
This is an attempt to use a fully upgrade assembly3 with speed modules, but this isn't able to feed quick enough.
