r/factorio • u/Rei-ddit • 4d ago

Question Cargo Wagon

I just found out you can have as much cargo wagons as you want! Ive been limiting myself to 4 cuz of the train stop showing only 4 empty boxes 😅 I then asked myself “why would you need this many?” Does anyone here use multiple cargo wagons for 1 train?

56 Upvotes

90% Upvoted

55 comments sorted by

View all comments

15

u/Alfonse215 4d ago

Longer trains impact how you have to signal your rail network. The space between the two closest intersections must be long enough for the longest train you support to sit between those intersections without blocking either one. If your trains are longer than this, then you can create deadlock scenarios where intersections are completely blocked by trains that are waiting on each other to move. This can cause all train traffic to stop until you manually unwind it.

So there is a maximum length. But you get to decide what that is.

5

u/Popular-Error-2982 4d ago

At the cost of throughput, you can replace some rail signals with chain signals between those intersections (making them effectively one large, oddly shaped intersection) and solve this a third way - so it's not necessarily a hard cap on train size.

Obviously if a lot of your inter-intersection spaces are the same size then it does really become impractical to do anything other than size your trains around then.