Starting to experiment with electric. First advice: don't step on the live rail!!

So it looks as if the loco stores enough energy to run for 128 blocks maybe, my test loop is 112 reinforced track long. After that a section of three electric tracks would recharge it. At low speed one track might do but at full speed it appeared to skip charging sometimes.

It looks as if I can use electric rails like booster tracks but with a really long interval in between.

Never used electric ones, always been interested though

Its been interesting, my original plan had been to use a CESU cart behind the locomotive to power it and use an energy loader to supply power.

I'm guessing a continuous electric track is possible. It looks as if under the current system the track will remain powered even if the energy source's chunk unloads.

One thing I'd like to figure out is how to use loaders and unloaders with trains. Do I just use the normal holding rail or a train holding rail? I'd like to have a row of loaders/unloaders positioned where the relevant carts will be. Normal holding rail works as the loader outputs redstone when a non-matching cart is in front. Train holding can be made to work using a redstone trail.

OK here's another question, does anyone know how to use the tracks that link and unlink carts? Specifically I'd like to catch individual carts then send them on once linked, so individual carts get joined into a train.

Oh and just for reference it looks as if elevator tracks uncouple carts. That sort of makes sense as whoever heard of trains going straight up, but then again 90 degree corners don't work too well in the real world either.

In the downward direction things mostly work, I have to re-couple the carts and the endmost one seems to get stuck. In the upward direction I get a pile-up.

What doesn't make sense is that if the carts weren't already coupled they'd go through fine, so an obvious fix would be to split them send them and reconnect them.

As we all know, I'm not an expert on modded servers, but I just thought I'd pose the question...

Are the problems happening at chunk borders? This is normally where most mods get issues due to chunks not being in-sync with each other, despite all being loaded at the same time.

Just a thought

I don't think so, but the room spans 3x3 chunks so it could have hit a chunk boundry within the room. Its more likely that I just pushed things a bit far by trying to make a train go vertical. Railcraft elevator rails have a curious interaction with the regular rail types. As an example it is possible to have a cart loader or unloader interact with a cart on a vertical rail but only with extra redstone logic to handle the rail direction.

So today's update...Watch out for the two different chest-cart types. Railcraft defines its own but by default you sometimes get the vanilla one instead which doesn't interact with other carts. Its fixed on chunk-load, but can be a problem in anchored chunks.

Also Electric locos stack for increased power. A train of one loco, MFE cart, undercutter, 4 chests and an anchor managed to half drain the MFE after driving most of the way down my tunnel so a MFE will get you a long way. With only one locomotive it was slow though.

The energy loader cart needs a transformer upgrade to charge the MFE cart. This probably means the unloader will also need an upgrade, and will output increased voltage.

You should avoid placing booster rails in your shunting/marshalling area as they interact with stationary trains in annoying ways including making the train reverse when it hit a bend.