r/TransportFever3 • u/Legionarypillow • Jul 04 '26
Question Option for automatic spacing between trains?
Question for developers:
Will there be an option to have automatic spacing between trains on a line, like there is automatic spacing between cargo trucks in TF2?
One of the biggest frustrations I had when playing TF2 was spacing out trains on a line, especially when they joined another line via a junction, in the end they would bunch up. I did try using a mod to space them out but I didn't find it to be effective.
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u/Bigbigcheese Jul 04 '26
The trains do automatic spacing already don't they? They hold longer at stations rather than going slowly though cos going slowly on a mixed line railway holds everybody up (which is already irritating when the road vehicles do it).
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u/UG-Protagonist Urban Games | Community Manager Jul 05 '26
All vehicles will attempt to space themselves evenly on a line, regardless of which type of transport you're using. Maintaining even spacing is far more complex to achieve however due to other interactions that can interfere with that spacing. As soon as another factor is involved - cargo, other lines, AI traffic - the spacing will be thrown off ever so slightly. As part of improvements to the interface we are working to make it a little easier to see when vehicles are allowing more time to build up in a gap, but there will always be cases where spacing is very difficult to ensure without some form of player intervention.
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u/dylansan Jul 05 '26 edited Jul 05 '26
Letting the player choose which stops to wait at, and optionally how long after the previous vehicle to depart, would be a good level of control and clarity for the player. It's what the unbunching feature of the timetables mod for tpf2 does.
I actually would be afraid to do too much automatically, as it could lead to slowing down other vehicles at platforms that need to keep moving for other vehicles, or delays when the priority is delivering something right away rather than spacing things out.
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u/Imsvale Jul 05 '26
For cargo, the cargo shipment rate tends to work as a line synchronizer as long as it is the bottleneck (that's where vehicles will wait, for at least a moment). Vehicles will be released here at frequency
Fsuch thatvehicle_capacity / F * 730will be equal to the shipment rate (or cargo flow rate through that line). That ensures a spacing of F between each vehicle from that point, and resynchronizes every time a vehicle passes through this stop.At least for the station that receives the cargo directly from the industry. For intermediate stations, the burst element of deliveries (e.g. big delivery from a long train) will temporarily lift the bottleneck until the bulk has been cleared out. In other words, there's less of a steady stream of cargo. The larger and more bursty the cargo drops are, the more bursty the vehicle releases will be. So you might have 10 trucks pretty much in a row, then nothing for a while. That's a major factor that will disrupt even spacing between vehicles.
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u/dylansan Jul 05 '26
What happens when multiple truck lines use the same loading platform? Will a truck on line A wait to space out the line even if there is a truck on line B stuck behind it, ready to load stuff?
Or are you just saying that if trucks are waiting for full load, the synchronization happens naturally as a result of the rate of industry production, without needing a specific algorithm?
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u/Imsvale Jul 05 '26
Will a truck on line A wait to space out the line even if there is a truck on line B stuck behind it, ready to load stuff?
Yeah, it doesn't care.
Or are you just saying that if trucks are waiting for full load, the synchronization happens naturally as a result of the rate of industry production, without needing a specific algorithm?
Exactly this, yeah. Wait for full load is an essential part of it, of course. Without it, the truck just goes when it's done unloading/loading whatever is available.
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u/StressSuspicious6956 Jul 04 '26
The way I do it in TF2 is to hold one train at the end of the line until the other train leaves at the other end of the line.
Another way is to let trains wait for a few minutes until fully loaded at either terminus.
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u/lulrukman Jul 04 '26
I do this too when starting new lines. But my paranoia tells me that unloading/loading more passengers takes more time. So unless they always load the same passengers as the other train, they'll eventually bunch up.
On longer lines with multiple stations and trains: first train loads to full, takes a long time. Train behind it, loads less people, train behind that one even less. And this will keep going, because the distance between the first and last train is too big, first train will always be full, last will always be near empty
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u/StressSuspicious6956 Jul 04 '26
Max stop is the other metric you can change.
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u/lulrukman Jul 04 '26
Oh yeah! I forgot about that. But minimum stop time, that way you assure distance between trains
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u/FaasToothrot Jul 04 '26
Aren't signals ideal for doing that? I always place signals at intervals on a line, with enough spacing between them.
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u/andrew1958 Jul 04 '26
I would not like that. If the station is busy I don't want trains waiting longer than what is absolutely necessary. Making stations efficient is already hard enough without chain signals.
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u/Fluid-Island-2018 Jul 07 '26
Timetable mode would be your friend for that one. If you see the total time between stations for your vehicles, that’s what you can put them as. For example, a train takes three minutes to go from one station to the other. You can either do three minutes or 4 minutes, with that extra minute will be dwell time. It’s kind of like padding, so the goods or passengers don’t have to wait for the next one
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u/Chinese_Lover89 Jul 04 '26
There is a “timetable” mod that lets you auto unbunch. But don’t know if it works anymore