Railway
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. :)
Learning Railway
Railway isn't learned in an instant! It takes some minutes to learn the basics and if you never played games like OpenTTD it takes some hours to really understand and master the train signals, so we recommend first this page:
Basic rail technology
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With Railway (Technology) you should know about
- Rails
- Raster of tracks - keep in mind, that you can build only on even tiles
- Railway/Rail info - hovering a rail-segment reveals some important information
- Vehicle/Train - the handling of loco and wagon
- Railway/Train stations - about the loading/unloading of trains
Automated rail transportation
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By researching Automated rail transportation you can use:
- Railway/Train stops - don't mix train stops with train stations!
- Railway/Automated transport - all about
- Railway/Train path finding - how the trains find their path
Rail signals
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Researching Rail signals enables to drive more trains.
- Railway/Signal
- Railway/Multiple trains
- Railway/How to see the blocks (about for turning debug mode, rail info on and better visibility in the next versions)
- Railway/Deadlocks
Safety first
- Railway/Do not cross the tracks: A train is very fast, take care!
- Vehicle/Train/Defence: As trains are a priority target of Enemies.
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.
About rails and tracks
- Railway/Track compositions: Switches, crossings, everything is build out of the two basic elements.
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".
Needed space
The space you need to built tracks is much bigger as you think. A 180 degree turn needs 12 tiles width! The simplest train station (1 loco, 1 wagon) also needs about 10-12 tiles. You should zoom out a bit before you begin to built.
Rail Glossary
- 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.
About Trains
- Vehicle/Train/Locomotive: A train needs a locomotive at minimum.
- Vehicle/Train/Wagon: A wagon is like a rolling chest, but the inserters can insert into it from a further distance.
- Vehicle/Train/Driving: You can enter a train by pressing the default key Enter.
- Vehicle/Train/Reverse driving: Possibilities to drive into the other direction when in automatic mode.
- Railway/Mixed transports - moving different items in wagons
- Railway/Size of trains - about the handling of equal and different train sizes
- Railway/Train make-up - about how long trains should be.
About train stations and stops
- Railway/Train station#Position_of_the_inserters Inserter positions
- Railway/The renaming-of-train-stop-trick: What happens, if you give a train stop the same name, as another train stop?
- Railway/Multiple trains/Single track: It is possible to operate multiple trains on one track.
- Railway/Difference train stop - train station: please don't mix train-station with train-stop.
Tipps & Tricks
- About a supply train following you to your outpost: http://www.factorioforums.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=6203
- You can lay rails by sitting inside of the train: