Advanced Building Revue 07: Stations

Building stations is one of the most essential things in OpenTTD. To build a station doesn’t require any experience (besides knowing which button to press), although construction of a station that works perfectly requires some deeper and in under-rated amount of knowledge. The point of this article isn’t in showing all possibilities how to make a station, but it should note as many things as possible in terms of what to consider when building a station and also, talking about signalling styles which are sadly almost ignored. Here I present to you, ABR07: Stations.
Stations
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Advanced Building Revue 06: Hubs

The fun, the creativity, the high league, the madness, the spaghetti, the mess, the weirdness, the braindisruptors. What else is so typical for our superior gaming style? Building hubs. In this article I am going to go into hub logics and techniques, examining some possibilities how a hub can be made. This article should help one realize what to think about and what to consider when building a hub. Note: This article expects you have proper building style as your blood group.

Hubs

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Advanced Building Revue 01

As we all know, we are a community based on cooperation. This also means that we must understand each other and see what each thing is supposed to do. I would like to talk about reading other’s ideas because of two basic reasons. The first is correcting stuff. Why do we have to use signs “on purpose” and why do some stations fail even though they are copied from the working ones? And what does that mean in general?

Sign Spam
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Fail-Safe Joiners, Priorities and the Cyclotron example

Some days ago I stumbled upon openttd wikis page about Railyway Designs and I saw the Cyclotron created by Pitt2. Those high speed injectors are not too new and we experimented with them a lot. Though we don’t use them in most cases, because they are difficult to build, depending on the properties of trains and such. Its just too much work for too less effect and pre-accelerated joiners are the better choice. Though I had a look at the construction and checked how it worked. A little footnote about a fixed bug made me curious, but then I understood that it fixes the issue which occurs if a train wants to join another track but in the same moment the signal turns red and the train stops blocking a complete line. Therefor we have the overtaking lanes in most SML constructions. We all like cool words for cool constructions, here they are. Fail-safe Joiners:

How it works

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Big hubs in a nutshell – finding a universal hub design

Recently I started playing a game on my own, featuring some LL-RR main network. When I had to build my first ever 4-way hub for double tracks, I first took a look at the Junctionary just to find out that all hubs were designed quite different and hardly any of them follow all necessary rules (curve length, double bridges/tunnels, merge after split). I then started wondering if there’s a universal way of thinking about hubs.
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