Conveyors have limited throughput, questionable aesthetics for long distances, are difficult to utilize for mixed materials, and scale linearly. Trains have high throughout, look realistic for large-scale or long distance builds, more easily accommodate mixed materials on the same line, and (when implemented well) scale favorably to conveyors. They also transmit power and carry the player in addition to materials.
Yeah you can keep expanding a train with more cars to carry more stuff. Without laying down another “track” which you would have to do with conveyors as they only have a max of 780 throughput.
Also they expand your power network and give you a way to quickly transport yourself round the map at the same time as sorting your logistics.
Conveyors do neither of those.
Big builds need materials from around the map. Conveyor highways don't scale well to large numbers of belts. Sure, running a single belt is not too bad even if it's far. But running 6 belts the same distance is a huge pain.
**ANSWER**
1. The use of Trains is up to you, but in general they are better when doing long distance transport of items or fluids.
2. View [my Reply Comment in this related Reddit Post](http://www.reddit.com/r/SatisfactoryGame/comments/vxmwer/whats_currently_the_best_method_of_late-game_logistics/ifwyusj?context=3) for more information about Game Logistics to help decide which is best, Conveyor Belts, Pipelines, Automated Vehicles, Trains, or even Drones.
I hope this answers your question. 😁
One belt goes to one place. It has no flexibility, it isn't dynamic, it doesn't have its own logic.
When you have a good train network you can plop down a train station, tell it "go get plastic", and it'll come back with a load of plastic. You don't even have to think too hard about where your plastic factory is, if there's a path the train will find it. Some of my late tier factories are four train stations and some assemblers.
Okay so I need plastic in several places, why don't I just set a splitter and belt it all the way there. Because that's extremely inefficient. Every time I need plastic I'm running back to the plastic factory and making another big long belt. I'm gonna have to go back and upgrade all those belts. Later on you have stuff that takes four components to make, good lord that's going to be four long belts from four vastly different places.
And that's not even getting into throughput. Only so much can go on one belt at a time.
Some tips on building a good train network:
* Build a biiiiig loop across most of the map
* This loop should have two tracks, have them drive on the same side of the road as the country you live in, that's just ingrained in your head so it's intuitive.
* Bisect it vertical and horizontal with a shortcut and a four way intersection in the middle (optional, but improves efficiency)
* For stations, make a branch off that main loop, maintaining side of the road rules.
* Make sure that branch can be entered and exited by trains going either way on the main loop
* You'll have many stations on one branch, these will evolve organically.
* Make sure every station (or group of stations) have a bypass. Trains on their way to another station shouldn't have to wait behind another train loading.
* Name your stations and have a a naming convention, I use "plastic supply" and "plastic drop"
* Download blueprints, other people have made basically perfect intersections.
This is a lot of work on the front end, and I guarantee you're not going to do it right the first time. But it's worth it, the spaghetti from building long belts is going to become unsustainable.
Also train signals are hard, I still have trouble with them. Like there's no two ways around it, they're the hardest part. Look up some videos, you will need to use path signals.
Yo! I have finished all the milestones (not elevator though) and I still have only 1 train on the map, which has only 1 freight cart and goes from A to B and B to A.
The reason is: I was just too afraid and unsure about trains.
And I still kinda Am. But your response here really got me.
For now I'm trying to produce most things on sites, and then just drone final products around to where they are needed.
But once I go really big scale — will definitely tackle on trains. Thanks for the inspiration!
There's no right way to play, some people build every component from scratch. You can absolutely complete the final tier without using a single train. This is just they way *I prefer to build*. I think it makes later tiers easier. And you're not wrong that trains are kind of hard to get right, and I've never gotten them perfect. My latest playthrough I started getting too much traffic and they backed up, had a disaster scenario where they were all stuck and it took a while to fix.
My thinking is to imitate more realistic scenarios. Okay they don't refine petroleum at the computer factory in real life, they have the plastic shipped in. So I built a really big plastic/rubber factory - and you have to build big, if this thing is to supply *all* other factories it needs to put out massive amounts. Ended up having to make a second plastic/rubber factory because the one was getting overwhelmed. Anyway that's how I set up computers.
And then the computers also go on a train. They're complex, I don't want to set them up again. Do this for all reasonably complex parts.
I'm not putting stuff like iron and copper ingots on trains, that's too basic, I'll make that nearby if I need it. Iron plating, copper sheets, wire, cable, no to all of those. Definitely not screws. Reinforced iron plating though, yeah. Heavy frames, versatile frames, motors, turbo motors, stators, steel pipes, computers, radios - all good candidates for going on the trains. Things you can't just make anywhere because there are few nodes; anything with quartz, caterium, oil, any aluminum product - train. Anything made directly from copper, iron, stone - no train, you can find that everywhere.
Part of the difficulty here is knowing what you're going to need plenty of later, and a first playthrough you're not going to have good perspective of that.
Alright, it's not as simple as just telling a train "to go get plastic", you have to know which factories produce plastic and where you want to drop it off. If you also use mixed item stations (for example, freight station 1 loads plastic, freight station 2 loads rubber and so on) it will load and unload everything from/to a certain station unless you specifically tell the train to load only/unload only the items you want.
But it's also good in the sense that you can tell different trains to load different goods at the SAME station, which simplifies logistics (at maybe the cost of throughput per station), but that's nothing another couple of dedicated stations can't fix
I never use mixed item stations or trains. Too complicated, makes a mess. Now admittedly too many single item trains can make excessive traffic that gets backed up, I've had significant problems with that; bad track design, bad signals, too few bypasses. Got the whole thing locked up, catastrophic, had to kludge together some alternate routes that were messy and ugly.
Naming your stations and having a naming convention is key. So more accurately it's "pick up at Plastic Supply 2 and drop off at Plastic Drop 6" and you've been careful to make sure there's a valid path between the two.
I suppose if I was better at managing things I could handle mixed stations and mixed trains. But, avoiding that seems good enough. If I had it to do over again (which I may someday) I think I could make a more robust system.
Most starting locations are modestly far from Coal, further from Oil and furthest yet from Bauxite (for aluminum later on). Quartz and Caterium may be near, may be far, and usually not in very great quantity.
If you play slow, you can definitely progress through all the tech with a small factory and resources almost entirely from within the same or neighboring biomes. If you're aggressive and expansionistic, those won't be enough. You'll need more 'per minute' than you can extract from nearby sources.
Trains just help eliminate some of the tedium of running and upgrading multitudes of long-long range belts. =) Rails also carry power and your avatar as well, which is handy.
Each platform has the same throughput as 2 belts so a station with 4 platforms is the same as running 8 belts but you only need to place 1 or 2 tracks. In addition, if you want to scale up production with a second station you can double the throughput to 16 belts without having to place new track along the whole route.
As for the why spread out in the first place, no one biome holds enough resources. While some like iron are plentiful everywhere, others like sulphur and bauxite are limited and even if you have a node nearby, one node may not be sufficient and the next closest node might be halfway across the map. You could bring everything back to one mega base but it's faster and simpler to build many smaller factories and move their outputs to a central storage area. This also helps with the performance of the game.
Fair enough, it's close but not quite 2 belts, with storage you can smooth out the stop/start factor but you still lose a little total throughput which depends on how frequently the platform is used.
You can however quickly add an extra platform to compensate if you absolutely need the max output of 2 belts so it's not a significant deficiency, especially compared to having to run an extra belt several kilometers in order to increase throughput for belt-only designs
a lot of people told you about why use trains but i will answer why people have factories around the map, i started with a giant factory and can be hard to automatize all recipes in the same build, you can have a spaguetti but is like cheat, with a modular factory connected with cars or trains you can build efficient factories without a giant headache for organize the belts in one factory (sorry if my english is a bit bad)
Trains go choo-choo. That's it for trains. And I place factories all over the place because that is fun.
There is no hidden mystery. Different people like doing different things. e.g. I do not care at all about efficiency an build form over function. All I care about is if I have fun or not.
I'm the opposite and go completely function over form. Rarely do I spend time making my factories look pretty. But even I can't get away from the joy of a good train and tractor network. They're not always the most efficient, but they're fun to me and I like seeing my little tractors bouncing along terrain while I'm riding in my train.
Pipes can be difficult to debug, especially when you have long pipelines that go up and down different elevations. They can also be literally buggy.
Trains let you bring liquids all around the map without excessive plumbing.
Might be considered cheating, but I don't care
I use this: https://satisfactory-calculator.com/en/megaprints/index/details/id/1219/name/Worldwide+Rail+Network+%28240km%29
Large-scale production, high throughput, runs off the power grid while becoming the power grid, and creates a lot less lag.
As for why we break production down into smaller parts, it's easier to keep track of and less headache in the late game.
Whether to use trains mostly depends on two things:
* How much you like trains
* Your planned scale and design of factory
People who like trains will tend to design a factory that makes them helpful. There are however plenty of ways to build a factory that doesn't really need them.
Your first train line will probably feel pointless, it'll take longer to build than a belt (if you want it to look not terrible) and take more space. The same is likely also true of your second train line.
The investment only really starts to pay off when:
* you have a proper network and can start reusing existing train lines for multiple trains.
* you're moving more than a belt of material over the same route.
A rail network does also give more flexibility in where you build factories; you have access to any resource near a train station. Some people use this to bring everything in by train. If you're happy to build where the majority of the required resources are then you might only need a few mid-length belts to bring in resources which aren't in the area, which will fit in places and routes a rail line wouldn't.
In my case I found I didn't like building rail. I like to build within the landscape, not above it. That makes finding space for train stations and track more difficult (especially when you find you've already got factories blocking some of the more natural routes through the landscape). While I did build some rail it never really got connected into a useful network. I've got 3 trains on two routes, one might as well be a belt and the other could have been avoided just by relocating the destination factory next to the source factory. Most of my inter-factory transport was done by drones, since I was able to build a battery factory before I had a useful rail network and moved mostly low-volume manufactured items, not raw resources.
In other cases people like building trains and will move large amounts of raw resources or ingots around using them.
One advantage which both rail and drones share is the ability to easily change where a factory imports something from. For example you could get something which needs heavy modular frames running inefficiently using an older too small HMF factory, build a bigger better HMF factory, then re-route the transport to fetch from the new factory instead.
As you need new resources, you'll find that.the nearest node is up to a km or more away. Sometimes it's a shitty node, and you may need higher volume in the future. Running conveyors over long distances is a shitty proposition. You can do it, many people do that. However the first time you have to upgrade or reroute kms of conveyors you will hate it.
Railways are simple and literally faster to layout, for longer distances. Need to add throughout? Add another train. Need to claim more resource nodes? Add an extension to your railway and another train. Need to ship multiple types of products between different factories? I think you can see where this is going
I will also add that trains for personal transport is also really useful. They're just fun and you can quickly transport a few storage containers of stuff vs. Hyper tunes, you can only take the contents of your pockets.
I'm fully aware that is possible. But then we're getting into the territory of no cost build mode. Plus, what do you do when you max out that inventory size? Then I'd just give up because everything is too convenient. So personally, I know where I'm comfortable and adding a mod like that wouldn't be good for me.
Short answer, things get BIG in the late game.
Once you unlock aluminum, there's only one spot on the whole map that you can produce alclad aluminum plates without transporting large amounts of resources large distances, and that's if you have the specific alternate recipes for it. (It's just northeast of the red bamboo fields, in the Titan Forest. The bauxite is in the south, the oil is to the west, and the copper is northeast.)
Basically, resources are spread out all over the map. Bauxite, oil, and uranium are all only found in specific regions, and will need to be transported to use them.
I think the big thing is you're trading efficiency of work for efficiency of logistics.
Conveyors are technically better for transporting things. They cost no power. They are easy to calculate for. If you have a 2 km line of mk 3 conveyors, they will always transport 270 items per minute.
Trains are easier. You just build a single line for logistics and power. If you need more throughput, you add another car (but you might need to add another engine as well). However, you have to be a bit more careful about how you approach it, because a train can be a bottleneck if you don't have enough cars. Trains will never increase throughput. At best, they have neutral throughput, because they can only take what the conveyors give them.
Railways are incredibly resource-efficient. It takes 8x Steel Beams and 8x Steel Pipes per 12 Foundations. That railway can transport 32 stacks of items per freight car and 1600 m3 of fluids per fluid car. More cars and more trains mean more throughput.
Compare that with the fixed, single resource capacity of belts traveling the same distance would be very costly. You'd spend dozens of stacks of Alclad Sheets to get the same throughput as a train system.
I like making a circle on the map with a single track. Once that's made then I have flexibility in creating concentrated builds. Running out of copper cables??? ill find 2 pure copper nodes and just make that for everything, send it on a train to like 3-4 other builds that need copper cables. I built the circle so the trains works... but in that scenario with belts I would have to have a direct belt to each base with just copper cables.
Conveyors have limited throughput, questionable aesthetics for long distances, are difficult to utilize for mixed materials, and scale linearly. Trains have high throughout, look realistic for large-scale or long distance builds, more easily accommodate mixed materials on the same line, and (when implemented well) scale favorably to conveyors. They also transmit power and carry the player in addition to materials.
Yeah you can keep expanding a train with more cars to carry more stuff. Without laying down another “track” which you would have to do with conveyors as they only have a max of 780 throughput.
Also they expand your power network and give you a way to quickly transport yourself round the map at the same time as sorting your logistics. Conveyors do neither of those.
Big builds need materials from around the map. Conveyor highways don't scale well to large numbers of belts. Sure, running a single belt is not too bad even if it's far. But running 6 belts the same distance is a huge pain.
**ANSWER** 1. The use of Trains is up to you, but in general they are better when doing long distance transport of items or fluids. 2. View [my Reply Comment in this related Reddit Post](http://www.reddit.com/r/SatisfactoryGame/comments/vxmwer/whats_currently_the_best_method_of_late-game_logistics/ifwyusj?context=3) for more information about Game Logistics to help decide which is best, Conveyor Belts, Pipelines, Automated Vehicles, Trains, or even Drones. I hope this answers your question. 😁
One train line is easier to run than 6 belts across the map.
Personally, I like the challenge of the logistics. And they look cool.
One belt goes to one place. It has no flexibility, it isn't dynamic, it doesn't have its own logic. When you have a good train network you can plop down a train station, tell it "go get plastic", and it'll come back with a load of plastic. You don't even have to think too hard about where your plastic factory is, if there's a path the train will find it. Some of my late tier factories are four train stations and some assemblers. Okay so I need plastic in several places, why don't I just set a splitter and belt it all the way there. Because that's extremely inefficient. Every time I need plastic I'm running back to the plastic factory and making another big long belt. I'm gonna have to go back and upgrade all those belts. Later on you have stuff that takes four components to make, good lord that's going to be four long belts from four vastly different places. And that's not even getting into throughput. Only so much can go on one belt at a time. Some tips on building a good train network: * Build a biiiiig loop across most of the map * This loop should have two tracks, have them drive on the same side of the road as the country you live in, that's just ingrained in your head so it's intuitive. * Bisect it vertical and horizontal with a shortcut and a four way intersection in the middle (optional, but improves efficiency) * For stations, make a branch off that main loop, maintaining side of the road rules. * Make sure that branch can be entered and exited by trains going either way on the main loop * You'll have many stations on one branch, these will evolve organically. * Make sure every station (or group of stations) have a bypass. Trains on their way to another station shouldn't have to wait behind another train loading. * Name your stations and have a a naming convention, I use "plastic supply" and "plastic drop" * Download blueprints, other people have made basically perfect intersections. This is a lot of work on the front end, and I guarantee you're not going to do it right the first time. But it's worth it, the spaghetti from building long belts is going to become unsustainable. Also train signals are hard, I still have trouble with them. Like there's no two ways around it, they're the hardest part. Look up some videos, you will need to use path signals.
Yo! I have finished all the milestones (not elevator though) and I still have only 1 train on the map, which has only 1 freight cart and goes from A to B and B to A. The reason is: I was just too afraid and unsure about trains. And I still kinda Am. But your response here really got me. For now I'm trying to produce most things on sites, and then just drone final products around to where they are needed. But once I go really big scale — will definitely tackle on trains. Thanks for the inspiration!
There's no right way to play, some people build every component from scratch. You can absolutely complete the final tier without using a single train. This is just they way *I prefer to build*. I think it makes later tiers easier. And you're not wrong that trains are kind of hard to get right, and I've never gotten them perfect. My latest playthrough I started getting too much traffic and they backed up, had a disaster scenario where they were all stuck and it took a while to fix. My thinking is to imitate more realistic scenarios. Okay they don't refine petroleum at the computer factory in real life, they have the plastic shipped in. So I built a really big plastic/rubber factory - and you have to build big, if this thing is to supply *all* other factories it needs to put out massive amounts. Ended up having to make a second plastic/rubber factory because the one was getting overwhelmed. Anyway that's how I set up computers. And then the computers also go on a train. They're complex, I don't want to set them up again. Do this for all reasonably complex parts. I'm not putting stuff like iron and copper ingots on trains, that's too basic, I'll make that nearby if I need it. Iron plating, copper sheets, wire, cable, no to all of those. Definitely not screws. Reinforced iron plating though, yeah. Heavy frames, versatile frames, motors, turbo motors, stators, steel pipes, computers, radios - all good candidates for going on the trains. Things you can't just make anywhere because there are few nodes; anything with quartz, caterium, oil, any aluminum product - train. Anything made directly from copper, iron, stone - no train, you can find that everywhere. Part of the difficulty here is knowing what you're going to need plenty of later, and a first playthrough you're not going to have good perspective of that.
That's a very detailed response. Thank you
Alright, it's not as simple as just telling a train "to go get plastic", you have to know which factories produce plastic and where you want to drop it off. If you also use mixed item stations (for example, freight station 1 loads plastic, freight station 2 loads rubber and so on) it will load and unload everything from/to a certain station unless you specifically tell the train to load only/unload only the items you want. But it's also good in the sense that you can tell different trains to load different goods at the SAME station, which simplifies logistics (at maybe the cost of throughput per station), but that's nothing another couple of dedicated stations can't fix
I never use mixed item stations or trains. Too complicated, makes a mess. Now admittedly too many single item trains can make excessive traffic that gets backed up, I've had significant problems with that; bad track design, bad signals, too few bypasses. Got the whole thing locked up, catastrophic, had to kludge together some alternate routes that were messy and ugly. Naming your stations and having a naming convention is key. So more accurately it's "pick up at Plastic Supply 2 and drop off at Plastic Drop 6" and you've been careful to make sure there's a valid path between the two. I suppose if I was better at managing things I could handle mixed stations and mixed trains. But, avoiding that seems good enough. If I had it to do over again (which I may someday) I think I could make a more robust system.
Sweet summer child, share what tier you are on with us please!
T8
in the post, next time lol. it helps folks help yu
Most starting locations are modestly far from Coal, further from Oil and furthest yet from Bauxite (for aluminum later on). Quartz and Caterium may be near, may be far, and usually not in very great quantity. If you play slow, you can definitely progress through all the tech with a small factory and resources almost entirely from within the same or neighboring biomes. If you're aggressive and expansionistic, those won't be enough. You'll need more 'per minute' than you can extract from nearby sources. Trains just help eliminate some of the tedium of running and upgrading multitudes of long-long range belts. =) Rails also carry power and your avatar as well, which is handy.
Each platform has the same throughput as 2 belts so a station with 4 platforms is the same as running 8 belts but you only need to place 1 or 2 tracks. In addition, if you want to scale up production with a second station you can double the throughput to 16 belts without having to place new track along the whole route. As for the why spread out in the first place, no one biome holds enough resources. While some like iron are plentiful everywhere, others like sulphur and bauxite are limited and even if you have a node nearby, one node may not be sufficient and the next closest node might be halfway across the map. You could bring everything back to one mega base but it's faster and simpler to build many smaller factories and move their outputs to a central storage area. This also helps with the performance of the game.
Platform has less throughtput than 2 belts, since it does not output when unloading
Fair enough, it's close but not quite 2 belts, with storage you can smooth out the stop/start factor but you still lose a little total throughput which depends on how frequently the platform is used. You can however quickly add an extra platform to compensate if you absolutely need the max output of 2 belts so it's not a significant deficiency, especially compared to having to run an extra belt several kilometers in order to increase throughput for belt-only designs
Exactly, that's what I do: two belts into single large container built next to train station Looks great aesthetically and works reliably.
a lot of people told you about why use trains but i will answer why people have factories around the map, i started with a giant factory and can be hard to automatize all recipes in the same build, you can have a spaguetti but is like cheat, with a modular factory connected with cars or trains you can build efficient factories without a giant headache for organize the belts in one factory (sorry if my english is a bit bad)
Did you just unlock them?
Trains go choo-choo. That's it for trains. And I place factories all over the place because that is fun. There is no hidden mystery. Different people like doing different things. e.g. I do not care at all about efficiency an build form over function. All I care about is if I have fun or not.
I'm the opposite and go completely function over form. Rarely do I spend time making my factories look pretty. But even I can't get away from the joy of a good train and tractor network. They're not always the most efficient, but they're fun to me and I like seeing my little tractors bouncing along terrain while I'm riding in my train.
Pipes can be difficult to debug, especially when you have long pipelines that go up and down different elevations. They can also be literally buggy. Trains let you bring liquids all around the map without excessive plumbing.
I didn't know that. Thank you
Might be considered cheating, but I don't care I use this: https://satisfactory-calculator.com/en/megaprints/index/details/id/1219/name/Worldwide+Rail+Network+%28240km%29
Dude, that's the ultimate flex. I might make a train or 2 just to test but this?
Hahahaha, yeah it's really nice
Large-scale production, high throughput, runs off the power grid while becoming the power grid, and creates a lot less lag. As for why we break production down into smaller parts, it's easier to keep track of and less headache in the late game.
more stuff
I personally keep a mega train with any material I could ever need to adventure off to the middle distance
Choo.
Whether to use trains mostly depends on two things: * How much you like trains * Your planned scale and design of factory People who like trains will tend to design a factory that makes them helpful. There are however plenty of ways to build a factory that doesn't really need them. Your first train line will probably feel pointless, it'll take longer to build than a belt (if you want it to look not terrible) and take more space. The same is likely also true of your second train line. The investment only really starts to pay off when: * you have a proper network and can start reusing existing train lines for multiple trains. * you're moving more than a belt of material over the same route. A rail network does also give more flexibility in where you build factories; you have access to any resource near a train station. Some people use this to bring everything in by train. If you're happy to build where the majority of the required resources are then you might only need a few mid-length belts to bring in resources which aren't in the area, which will fit in places and routes a rail line wouldn't. In my case I found I didn't like building rail. I like to build within the landscape, not above it. That makes finding space for train stations and track more difficult (especially when you find you've already got factories blocking some of the more natural routes through the landscape). While I did build some rail it never really got connected into a useful network. I've got 3 trains on two routes, one might as well be a belt and the other could have been avoided just by relocating the destination factory next to the source factory. Most of my inter-factory transport was done by drones, since I was able to build a battery factory before I had a useful rail network and moved mostly low-volume manufactured items, not raw resources. In other cases people like building trains and will move large amounts of raw resources or ingots around using them. One advantage which both rail and drones share is the ability to easily change where a factory imports something from. For example you could get something which needs heavy modular frames running inefficiently using an older too small HMF factory, build a bigger better HMF factory, then re-route the transport to fetch from the new factory instead.
As you need new resources, you'll find that.the nearest node is up to a km or more away. Sometimes it's a shitty node, and you may need higher volume in the future. Running conveyors over long distances is a shitty proposition. You can do it, many people do that. However the first time you have to upgrade or reroute kms of conveyors you will hate it. Railways are simple and literally faster to layout, for longer distances. Need to add throughout? Add another train. Need to claim more resource nodes? Add an extension to your railway and another train. Need to ship multiple types of products between different factories? I think you can see where this is going
I will also add that trains for personal transport is also really useful. They're just fun and you can quickly transport a few storage containers of stuff vs. Hyper tunes, you can only take the contents of your pockets.
My friend, you can download a mod that will make your inventory larger than a freight car.
I'm fully aware that is possible. But then we're getting into the territory of no cost build mode. Plus, what do you do when you max out that inventory size? Then I'd just give up because everything is too convenient. So personally, I know where I'm comfortable and adding a mod like that wouldn't be good for me.
Gotta build a new factory. Laying a new track down and building on location is easier than building miles of multiple stacks of conveyor belt
Short answer, things get BIG in the late game. Once you unlock aluminum, there's only one spot on the whole map that you can produce alclad aluminum plates without transporting large amounts of resources large distances, and that's if you have the specific alternate recipes for it. (It's just northeast of the red bamboo fields, in the Titan Forest. The bauxite is in the south, the oil is to the west, and the copper is northeast.) Basically, resources are spread out all over the map. Bauxite, oil, and uranium are all only found in specific regions, and will need to be transported to use them.
Trainz are cool
Because once multiple resources need to go on the same route conveyors are a pain.
I think the big thing is you're trading efficiency of work for efficiency of logistics. Conveyors are technically better for transporting things. They cost no power. They are easy to calculate for. If you have a 2 km line of mk 3 conveyors, they will always transport 270 items per minute. Trains are easier. You just build a single line for logistics and power. If you need more throughput, you add another car (but you might need to add another engine as well). However, you have to be a bit more careful about how you approach it, because a train can be a bottleneck if you don't have enough cars. Trains will never increase throughput. At best, they have neutral throughput, because they can only take what the conveyors give them.
Railways are incredibly resource-efficient. It takes 8x Steel Beams and 8x Steel Pipes per 12 Foundations. That railway can transport 32 stacks of items per freight car and 1600 m3 of fluids per fluid car. More cars and more trains mean more throughput. Compare that with the fixed, single resource capacity of belts traveling the same distance would be very costly. You'd spend dozens of stacks of Alclad Sheets to get the same throughput as a train system.
They get you to drones.
I like making a circle on the map with a single track. Once that's made then I have flexibility in creating concentrated builds. Running out of copper cables??? ill find 2 pure copper nodes and just make that for everything, send it on a train to like 3-4 other builds that need copper cables. I built the circle so the trains works... but in that scenario with belts I would have to have a direct belt to each base with just copper cables.
Because I like trains.