I’m not a fan of all these notifications, but one of the most important ones isn't displayed reliably. If a train has no holding bay available, it simply stops at a station and doesn't move on—and consequently, it doesn't issue a notification either. I probably don't need to spell out what that implies. There are times when many trains are running and there are enough holding zones, but who can calculate that precisely? Since using up space for holding zones always feels a bit painful, I would appreciate it if a train only left the depot after the game performed an internal check to ensure there are enough holding spaces in total—rather than just checking for temporarily free ones at the moment of departure. Train Departure / Check Holding Bays / Unassigned to Line or Network / Not Available / No Departure / Show Notification.
"Train has no available Holding Bays" notification.
Does that not mean that you always need as many waiting bays as you have trains? If you want to have this at least it should be an option because i don't need that many.
How about if it does not have a waiting bay it goes back to depot?
Yes, that’s exactly what it means—especially with larger save files involving a network, you get spikes in activity when factories suddenly kick into gear. This also means the material requirements for contracts increase; if you have more trains than available waiting slots, a train might just randomly stop at a station once the situation stabilizes. Of course, I’d prefer some kind of building that could serve as virtual storage 🙂 Or at least a notification when a train leaves the depot. The problem is, if a stop becomes available for just a few seconds, a train depart from the depot will grab it and assume it has enough waiting slots. There are sporadic alerts, but they always disappear too quickly because he’s found something somewhere else.
That’s why I’d prefer the "no departing" option—given that there are too few waiting areas overall. That way, you can be certain that the issue is simply a lack of waiting areas.
Similarly, you don't get a notification for train gridlock. I'd say it would be much harder to detect without false positives, but it's also something that can cause serious problems
That’s true; usually, you only notice it if you happen to see it by chance, or—more often—you only realize it when you notice that materials are missing somewhere. Sometimes I’m so focused on building "spaghetti" layouts that I stay in one part of the map and don't even notice it happening—not until the situation has already gotten pretty bad. 🙂
Yeah, not sure how to manage it. For me, it often occurs because trains can't leave stations (and there they don't count as arriving at the station). So more trains come, and eventually it clogs up to a gridlock.
If we had a 'priority' paint color for rail, that could be solved
devs can probably check if train speed is 0 and train is not in the station/waiting bay for more than N time then show an alert
True. But some builds might intentionally have a train waiting for extended periods somewhere. Like a stacker in front of a station in a train line setup.
I guess that shouldn't happen in train networks? So maybe warning for network trains with 0 speed for more than x time would be false-positive free.
When running a scheduled service, an experienced player knows that waiting trains shouldn't block the main line, so they simply build holding areas—which may be fuller or emptier at times—accordingly. In networks handling trains of varying sizes, it would make a lot of sense to have a "do not dispatch from depot" option for cases where there is an overall shortage of holding tracks; this would prevent trains from ending up waiting simply because there isn't enough holding space. It would be useful because you could see whether you need to build a holding track for a large train versus another type—a distinction that matters significantly in terms of space. I’d also like to add that, otherwise, I am very happy that we got this network system.