Advanced Trackwork

Now that I’ve covered the basic “how to A-to-B” part, let’s deal with the greater tangle. We’ll assume you’ve put in a week or two with your startup train and you’ve found things around the world that you want to bring home.

So we build more tracks, right?

Well here we go. After building that short line to the village in the “Basics” guide, I found another village just like it. I’ve already established track to that village but I soon figured out that being able to hit up both villages in one trip made more sense.

That means I need to change this switch so I can go from either village to the other without going home to turn around. I need what’s called a “Wye”, and I’m a huge fan of these.

Basically it’s three switch tracks arranged to give you a ‘T’-shape, allowing you to take your train in three directions instead of two. There’s a couple different ways to make these depending on your specific tracks.

So we bust up the straight track on the left, and lay down a Large switch to match the one that’s already there. This does require two-block spacing between the tracks that curve.

With the first two switches down, we need the third. This one has to be a Parallel switch.

Then fill in the missing sections and add levers. In some cases these switches can be left “On” to always route your train in a certain direction.

Wyes like this are also a compact alternative to the ‘Return Loop’ I showed in the basics. While building on Trainserb, these provided fast transitions for me to get off our main lines and onto my own private tracks.

Incidentally, this is a nice example of a single-to-double wye.

No one said these need to be flat, or small. This one is at a junction between Trainserb’s “Black Line” and my mountain forestry line.

X-CROSSOVERS
Unless you’re just laying track for the hell of it, don’t expect to use these often. Nevertheless, there are ways to use them. These are a rarity and purely situational. When you need one, you will know it.




Switch Crossovers/Switchovers
Something Traincraft tracks cannot do efficiently yet. If you want to make these, you’re stuck with using Vanilla/RailCraft tracks. RoW users will find tracks specially made for this. These only apply to parallel sections of track.

Worth noting that RailCraft switchovers such a this require a two-block space between the tracks for this to work properly.

My first railroad, and first railyard, way back when I started playing.
Railyards
And here’s the big fish. The Railyard. The concepts for making these should not be very difficult at this point, but their sheer size and complexity of operation is why I include them here. They may grow organically as you add storage tracks outside your home, or they may be a planned construction in another part of the world. Either way, they serve the same purpose. This is your train warehouse, your parking garage and your launch center all rolled into one. There are three main uses for a railyard that I have come across in MineCraft.

1. Storage
This is purely for the sake of keeping multiple trains out and ready to go at a moment’s notice. One thing to be aware of here is that some multiplayer servers may not allow for this, since each train car is an individual entity and locomotives act as chunk loaders.

2. Sorting/Transfer
If you have a bunch of tracks from different industries that converge at one point, this is likely what you will be doing the most of. This sort of yard is set up to take in trains from different origins and process each car for storage of the payloads or transfer the loads to another player’s train. One thing to keep in mind here is that each track you put down will have to have a specific purpose in mind.

3. Inbound/Outbound
This concept borrows a lot from the previous two, but the overall idea of this one is to assist you, the player, with putting together one train before you leave and breaking down/processing that train when you return home. This yard is most likely next to your house or shop and will probably be the home of your go-to train.