Multi-rail switch stations?

[Cyrilix 0]

By small, I'm thinking of 2x4 (for instance, for a 4-lane rail switch. Its main function wouldn't be as a terminal where passengers get on and get off, but rather as a switch, to redirect any of 4 incoming rails to any of 4 outgoing rails.

I have a few options:

- Use a 4-in/4-out station like the Baron Cross Station (STEX). While a very good and useful station, it's too large to act as a flexible switch for massively scalable rail systems.

- Cross 4 rails in a zig zag shape. This is very messy and prone to overlap, causing traffic imbalance by a factor of up to 4x the average traffic. Case in point, due to lack of proper design in my current bus-based city (and I mean a bus in the distributed systems sense, not a passenger bus), I've opted to instead attempt a dedicated circuit-based design.

- Use 5 of 2-in/2-out stations in an X shape (5 mini switches to emulate a single 4/4 switch).

- Hope that someone on this forum has found a lot that I haven't yet seen, that does what I want (or has made one for themselves) in an attempt to simulate an EXTREMELY distributed transit network.

[thefunktopus 1]

There is something called a dual track crossover, included with the NAM. It's basically and X shape where trains can cross. It is 1x4 or 4 and in the Railway FARR pieces menu.

[Cyrilix 0]

Originally posted by: thefunktopus

There is something called a dual track crossover, included with the NAM. It's basically and X shape where trains can cross. It is 1x4 or 4 and in the Railway FARR pieces menu.quote>

Good to know, but won't the center of that X have double the traffic and therefore cause congestion? A station, on the other hand doesn't seem to cause congestion, because once you enter the station, the entire station is treated as a massive capacity single tile (so as long as the station can support the traffic of all tracks entering it, then there's no problem).

An ideal structure might be something like 4x4, with 4 tracks going out in each direction.

[z1 566]

Congestion only happens when you approach network capacity, and the congestion caused by a single tile of a network is negligible. Due to the way SC4 is built, congestion causes far less slowdowns than it does in the real world..

[dekany 0]

I tried this dual-track crossover piece. There are two problems with it, which seem to be serious bugs. First, the arrows which indicate the switch positions look always the same (this is the same problem with every other NAM rail piece that contains a switch). Therefore, it is impossible to tell which way the train will go. The second problem is that, although the train changes the track at the switch, but after leaving the crossover piece, on the next dual track tile it immediately jumps back to the original track, which looks ridiculous.

[lalaz4 1]

I agree we need a station like that.