Freight Stations

Freight Stations

Long storage containers that sit alongside your train wagons. Link several together with stock balancers and they share one inventory, so every inserter loading or unloading any wagon fills and draws from the same pool. No more uneven wagons, no chest-to-chest belt spaghetti.

Fluid stations do the same for fluids: long tanks beside your fluid wagons, joined by fluid balancers into one shared tank.

This mod is arguably overpowered. It is a convenience mod that trivialises balancing for trains. If you enjoy this part of the game I recommend you skip this mod.

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How it works

1. Build a train stop with straight track running past where the wagons will stand.
2. Place freight stations beside the wagons. A station is 6 tiles long, exactly one wagon. Put it parallel to the rail, 1–2 tiles away (room for an inserter, or a pair of loaders). It snaps to the nearest wagon position.
3. Leave a 1-tile gap between stations and put a stock balancer in each gap (filled in automatically when you drag-build, but you can remove them if you want several groups or none). Every station connected through balancers becomes one group with one shared inventory.
4. Add inserters between the stations and the wagons. Done.

While holding a station, valid spots next to each wagon are shaded green. A station placed anywhere else is refused and the item comes back.

Both sides of the track

An underground stock balancer links the station rows on opposite sides of the track into a single group. Place one in a gap on one side, then a second one facing it on the other side (up to 8 tiles apart). A green dashed line confirms the pair. R flips its direction, like an underground belt.

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Tiers

| | Iron | Steel | |---|---|---| | Station footprint | 6 × 1 | 6 × 2 | | Slots per station | 134 | 202 | | Stack size | normal | ×2 | | Max stations per group | 100 | 50 | | Research | Freight stations | Steel freight stations |

Only stations of the same tier and orientation can be linked, and balancers only connect their own tier.

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Fluid stations

The fluid counterpart, placed exactly like a freight station: press R to pick the orientation, and the tank snaps to a fluid wagon's position at a train stop.

1. Place fluid stations 2 tiles from the rail, where a pump fits between the tank and a fluid wagon. The green guide shows the spots.
2. Put a fluid balancer in each gap. Tanks joined this way share one fluid, like a pipe system: the capacity is the sum of the row. Drag-building and blueprints fill the gaps for you, but never join two tanks holding different fluids.
3. Add pumps anywhere along either long side of a tank. Pipes can join a row from behind as well.

An underground fluid balancer joins the rows on both sides of the track, just like the underground stock balancer (up to 8 tiles apart, R flips it, a green dashed line confirms the pair).

| | Fluid station | Steel fluid station | |---|---|---| | Footprint | 6 × 1 | 6 × 2 | | Holds | 150,000 (three fluid wagons) | 500,000 (ten fluid wagons) | | Research | Fluid stations | Steel fluid stations |

A sight glass on each tank shows its level, a circuit wire on any tank reads the whole row, and hovering a tank outlines every tank it shares its fluid with. A tank you mine leaves its fluid to the rest of the row, as far as it fits; a lone tank's fluid is lost, like a vanilla storage tank's.

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Good to know

• Auto-connect: drag-building and pasting a blueprint fill in balancers between matching stations, and robots do the same for every station ghost they build. A single click by hand never does, so you can keep neighbours separate.
• Hover a station or fluid station to outline everything it shares its inventory or fluid with.
• Circuit network: wire any station or tank to read the whole group's contents. One wire per group is enough.
• Blueprints of a station row can be rotated and flipped. The game won't flip a blueprint that contains a train stop, so leave the stop out of blueprints you want to flip.
• Stations must be at a train stop, on straight, non-elevated rail, within the first 12 carriages.

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Compatibility

Factorio 2.0 (base ≥ 2.0.56) and 2.1 (separate release). Space Age is not required.

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AI disclaimer

This mod was made with heavy help from AI (Claude by Anthropic). Most of the Lua code and the Blender scripts that render the graphics were written by the AI, with design, direction and in-game testing done by me. If you hit a bug, please report it in the discussion tab.