Yeah I already have a book of tracks, but I will definitely add station blueprints to it!

I also use “in” and “out”, in combination with rich text. For example, iron ore stations might be:

[IRON ORE RICH TEXT] 1-4 Iron Ore - Out [IRON ORE RICH TEXT] 1-4 Iron Ore - In

Where the “Out” station is at the resource patch (ore comes out of the ground) and “In” is at the base (ore goes in to the factory). I also include the train type in my station names (1-4).

See https://lemmy.ml/comment/686775 for what I mean by rich text

Thanks for the links. TCS and TSM look especially interesting… I may have to check them out

This was very in-depth, thanks a lot!

If I am reading this correctly, the parking area is only to serve as a buffer for trains that have nowhere to go, right? For example, if there are no stations that have enough resources for a train to pickup, the train will be forced to wait at parking. This is one of the problems that I had been running into with my old system, and this will definitely solve it.

And yes, I had been using train limits instead of enable/disable. I especially like your idea of

If you can request 3 trains, you need to make sure that there’s space to park 2 trains by the station where they won’t interrupt traffic. I did it simpler to just have multiple pickup stations in parallel and depending on waiting material request 1 or 0 trains.

Also, I will be sure to include the train type in my stations, i can see this being very useful if I want to scale up in the future!

I will give LTN a look, although I am fairly set on not using any train mods. Thanks for the advice though!