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Railway

From Official Factorio Wiki
Revision as of 20:26, 4 March 2016 by Thrawcheld (talk | contribs) (→‎Rail Glossary: copy editing)
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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. :)

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

A very minimal station. The gaps between the inserters are no longer needed.
Rail-segments Trains
Straight rail Diesel locomotive |- Curved rail Cargo wagon |-

With Railway (Technology) you should know about

Automated rail transportation

Train stop |-

By researching Automated rail transportation you can use:

Rail signals

Station with Rail signals to allow operation of multiple trains on single track.
Rail signal |- Rail chain signal |-

Researching Rail signals enables to drive more trains.

Safety first

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

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

About train stations and stops

Tipps & Tricks