Although thowing down track blueprints is a fairly straightforward and intuitive process, there are several hidden features and best practices that are not communicated nor readily recognized by players.



Laying track blueprints is as simple as pressing B to access your build menu. Navigate to the Foundation Tab where you will find both narrow and standard gauge track. Each track gauge has 3 track options: Track, Foundation Track, and Biarc.

• Track is your standard building block, capable of being laid perfectly straight or in a gradual curve. Each section of track can be built to a minimum of 5m, and up to approximately 30m depending on its curvature and incline.
  
  
• Foundation Track is almost identical, with the exception that it must be placed on a foundation. Its standard gauge application is niche at best.
  
  
• Biarc has the added bonus of allowing the player to adjust the pivot point of the end of the track, perfect for navigating around obstacles and creating switches, junctions, and s-curves. Biarc is also useful for building on gradients, where sloping terrain creates difficulties.

There are several inputs that are useful when blueprinting and placing track:

• If you place a piece of biarc track, holding down right click and moving the mouse left and right will pivot the end of the piece, allowing you to create custom curves.
  
  
• If you use scroll wheel up and down while blue printing track, you can change the incline of the piece of track, although there are strict limitations put in place for how far off the ground a piece of track can be.
  
  
• If you hold right click and scroll wheel simultaneously, you can change the elevation of the mid point of the track, and its angle of incidence. This is incredibly useful for clearing terrain obstacles.

Each piece of track, regardless of length, requires 5 Processed Construction Materials, or pcons, to complete. You do this by holding a pcon in your player characters arms, and left clicking on the track blueprint. Your character can only hold one pcon at a time. Pcons are produced in a Metalworks Facility Building, requiring some combination of Construction Material, or cmat, and components.

Placing Track has significant limitations when you are blueprinting.

• If you attempt to start a blueprint too far away from your player character, it will be denied.
  
• If you are standing too far from the mid point of the piece of track, it will throw an error that you are too far.
  
• If you continue to drag a blueprint too far from its start point, where it tells you that the structure is too long, it will disconnect the start of the blueprint from whatever you were connecting it to, forcing you to walk back and start over.

Your view range is also limited while you are holding a heavy object, such as a pcon, and placing pcons on the ground is dangerous as they have an incredibly short despawn timer.

When building rail networks, there are several best practices that will help you perfect your tracklaying:



Step 1: Survey
The most critical tool in your arsenal when laying any length of track are binoculars. Binoculars increase your situational awareness and make surveying easier. Surveying is critical at determining the path of least resistance when attempting to connect two locations by rail. Many hexes and sections of the map are very inhospitable to rail without careful planning, due to terrain and world props, compounded by player built structures such as bunkers and facilities that will inevitably be built first due to how long track takes to tech.

There are two factors to prioritize when planning a route. Try to plan your route as straight as possible, and plan ahead to integrate regular passing tracks along your right of way. A passing track needs to be at least 140m to accommodate a full length train. Also, you must be cognizant of anything along the right of way that would drain supply from your maintenance of way sheds/maintenance tunnels. Although there is an argument to be made for taking advantage of ambient supply, I find it is better to build as far away from other players' installations as possible to maintain as much control as possible.




Step 2. Track Gang and MOW Equipment
Having managed 4 hexes worth of mainline rail over the course of 2 wars, I have gained a lot of experience putting together manpower and equipment to quickly and efficiently throw down rail. With good planning and good help, you can network an entire hex over the course of several hours.

I very much recommend using the trains to help aid in construction. 2 Locomotives & tenders, ~5 flatcars, and one infantry car creates a perfect MOW train. You also need at least 1 cv, one crane, at least 3 pallets of pcons, a hauler full of bmats, and a jeep.

I also recommend having aprox 3-5 people helping. You need 1 person to drive the train to the railhead (end of the line you are building off of), 1 person to drive the cv, one person to drive the crane (these cannot be packaged and loaded on the train). When you reach the railhead, unload your hauler, jeep, and a pallet of pcons from the train. Have the cv operator start building the encampments/ bunkers to supply the rail approximately every 140m. Do not build them directly adjacent to the track, leave at least a track width and a half between the track and the edge of the encampment/bunker. Have the jeep operator load his jeep with pcons from the pallet and shuffle pcons to whoever is blueprinting track. Everyone else will either be digging bunkers or filling blueprints in with pcons from the pallet.

Once you have added significant length to the existing track, you can load everything back up into the train and move the consist forward to the new railhead.

Other assorted tidbits:

• You can build junctions off of devtrack, but there are limitations to doing so due to the terrain devtrack is usually built in.
  
• Using the BetterMap_Roadtiers_Complete_v3.0 Mod[sentsu.itch.io] will drastically improve your tracklaying, as it has a topographical map and shows where most devtrack is.
  
• If a track upon which a junction is built decays, but the track that splits off of it remains, you will have to remove the existing track to rebuild the switch.

Thanks to tight turn radii for standard gauge track in the game, the only junction that is necessary is a small, compact, wye junction.


This is almost perfectly applicable anywhere you need trains going divergent directions off the mainline. In many cases, you dont even need a full junction, as long as a single switch can maintain flow of traffic. This design is also convenient for the engineer, as all the switchstands are as close as possible, making leaving the locomotive to switch the tracks as brief as possible.

In this vein, it is critical to sign your junctions to preserve the navigability of the network.


A simple sign pointing out the major locations or hexes each direction will take them toward is crucial to helping other trains navigate through unfamiliar territory. I consider this a necessity anywhere the track diverges from the mainline.

There is a lot of debate surrounding how best to supply the railroad. Gsupps are a necessary evil to prevent construction spam, but streamlining how we supply the rail to prevent burnout for players who do rail maintenance is critical.

Maintenance Hatches

Maintenance Hatches are a facility building that provides supply within a 40m radius. They can either have a maximum of 1k gsupps deposited directly, or, if powered, can turn cmats into gsupps. They can hold a maximum of 1k cmats in their inventory. Maintenance hatches cannot level up to large garrison, and will incur full supply cost compared to leveled up encampments and bunkers. They require a CV to build, and cost 200 cmats. Maintenance Hatches also only supply facility structures, limiting ambient supply and gsupp leaching by other players.

Encampments

Encampments are currently the default choice for tracklayers to supply their networks. They cost 300 bmats to build, require a CV, and have a supply radius of 80m, meaning they should typically be placed every 140m. Encampments have the added bonus of telegraphing their position to the map, allowing other players to intuit that the line of regularly placed encampments are probably an active rail line. Their current gsupp inventory is also visible from the map, making it relatively easy to top them off. They can also offer supply to another critical piece of rail infrastructure: watchtowers. Watchtowers are necessary so other train crews can see where trains are active on the network, allowing them to communicate when they will meet and pass each other, and to have up to date information of enemy activity along the route. If you build encampments simultaneously with your track, they will tech small garrison around the same time that track decay starts.

Bunkers

The third method for supplying rail are bunkers. Although most would consider these overkill simply for maintaining track, they do have their niche uses closer to the frontline. Unfortunately, the rules of the game mean partisans have an easy time, generally, navigating to mid and backline hexes, especially in the south. Encampments are very fragile to HE grenades and machine gun fire, and, especially if watchtowers are built directly adjacent to the encampment, are prime, easy targets for partisans. Therefore, in areas easily accessed by enemy players, a bunker has 2 benefits. 1, if designed properly, their initial cost and gsupp consumption is on par with an encampment surrounded by walls and pillboxes and 2. provide a deterrent to partisans bumping into them.

These bunker designs were provided by [9th]Sophie, and proved very successful in Loch Mor during the current war.




Bunkers do have the detriment of teching slower and requiring a slightly more involved construction process, but they are well worth it in my eyes at curbing the main vulnerabilities of other supply methods.

I also recommend, unlike the photo, to build your watchtowers at the edge of their supply range, not directly adjacent, as explained by a captured Warden partisan, they will generally only target rail encampments to get at watchtowers, as they understand how much of a pain rail maintenance is. So by building your watchtowers away from your supply, you paint them as a less desirable target, although this is not universally applicable. Obviously some partisans will target rail supply to hurt rail logistics.

Ambient Supply and Other Supply Nodes

There is an argument to be made about taking advantage of nearby player installations. Sometimes this is necessary, as certain choke points will inevitably have bunker bases that must be built around, and they will end up supplying track. In my opinion, this is a symbiotic relationship, but I recognize that some bunker builders, despite track having a 75% chance to not consume gsupps per tick, do not want to provide supply to nearby rail.

Worth noting are using Safehouses, Town Halls, and Relic Bases to provide supply to rail. They have the added benefit of being difficult to destroy and have wider supply ranges. Safehouses, for example, supply everything within 100m, and I believe Relic bases are 140m. However, it is rare, and not recommended, that you will have an opportunity to build directly adjacent to take advantage of their full supply range. There is also the detriment that in most cases, they will be the primary supply node for everything within their range, and their gsupp consumption will be much higher. If the faction does not help in providing supply to that base, you will find yourself burdened with supplying that node. They are also less intuitive to discern from the map that they are supplying rail, because they break the clearly defined line of encampments/bunkers typically denoting a right of way.

The Black Bolt Steam Locomotive is the only locomotive in the game as of current. It is a fictional 0-6-2 coal fired steam locomotive vaguely inspired by European steam locomotives around the turn of the century. It can haul a total of 15 cars, and has 3 inventory slots that, while primarily used for fuel, can hold other equipment.



The locomotive can have 2 operators, one engineer/driver, and one fireman. The locomotive controls like any other vehicle sans steering, W will drive the locomotive forward, S will reverse. New drivers generally are not prepared for the amount of momentum the locomotive carries compared to other vehicles ingame, and conventionally takes a significant amount of time and distance to stop. Furthermore, even when the locomotive comes to a complete stop, the game will continue shuffling the rest of the train into a resting position which can take several seconds, preventing the driver from exiting the cab. This can be completely mitigated, however, by pressing CTRL+2 to switch to the vacant fireman position, which will instantly stop the whole train in its tracks, allowing a quick exit from the locomotive. It goes without saying that this cannot be done if the fireman position is occupied.

Another integral hidden mechanic to make driving the train less insufferable is the cruise control bug. This works for any vehicle, but is, in my opinion, necessary for driving the train. Press Enter to open your text chat, press CTRL+movement key, either W or S, and hit Enter again. Your movement key will be "stuck" on until you enter chat or hit the movement key again.

The fireman's role is to shovel coal from the tender to the locomotive, providing a temporary speed boost. In the upper left corner of the screen there is a percentage displayed that will tick down from 250% to 100%. If the fireman hits E when the percentage reaches between 200% and 190%, he will maximize coal usage efficiency while maintaining the speed boost consistently. In my opinion, it is by far better to forgo having a fireman to leave the spot vacant to instantly stop the train, and to maintain the coal in the tender as a reserve for when the locomotive inevitably runs out of fuel, especially on multihex trips. It is worth noting that regardless of whether or not there is a fireman, the locomotive will not automatically pull coal from the tender to the locomotive inventory.

One unique mechanic of the locomotive, within the context of a double ended train, is that only one locomotive driver position can be occupied at once. As long as you occupy the engineer position, partisans attempting to steal your train on the other end will be unable to enter the locomotive, buying you time to have your teammates respond to the threat. You can, however, have someone in the fireman position of the rear locomotive.

There are 4 pieces of rolling stock ingame critical to railroad operations: The Black Bolt Locomotive, the Rock Hauler Coal Tender, The Longrider Flat Car, and the Holdout Infantry/Passenger Car. Based on my experience, I recommend building the following consist as your primary logistics train:

Locomotive-Tender-5 Flatcars-Passenger Car-5 Flatcars-Tender-Locomotive

There are several ingame limitations that necessitate this or similar compositions while still trying to maximize carrying capacity:

Double ending the train is necessary because of speed limitations placed on reversing/pushing locomotives. I have found that the only scenario in which a locomotive will still run at full speed in reverse is when it has a tender and 2 flat cars. Any more than that and it will only crawl. By having a locomotive on the other end, the return trip is as simple as having the engineer/driver move to the opposite locomotive. Furthermore, it is almost completely impossible to have any meaningful turnarounds at any destination due to dev track/terrain. For a significant period of time during the first 1.0 war we would waste upwards of 15 minutes using a crane to place the locomotive on the other end of the train so we could drive at full speed. The inefficiency was painfully obvious.

Another perk of double ending the train is that it is faster/more convenient to load/unload at storage depots and seaports. On the surface this is obvious, as having fewer cars means less cargo. But the intuitiveness comes from navigating devtrack. In many locations, this is the perfect length train for having all of the cargo within reach of the static cranes, such as Great Warden Dam, Allsight, Fiermor, Blemish, and Longstone with a small player extension on the east end.

The infantry car is a great boon as well when applied correctly. I find it consistent that I have crew that participate in the train trip, and when problems inevitably arise, they are present to help. The infantry car has also been surprisingly integral to defending the train. For example, I cannonballed a mixed freight to Silk Farms through an active frontline. received two cutler rpg's to my locomotive, and kept on trucking. My teammate then gunned down the offending warden as we passed. Thankfully the locomotive has as much health as a freighter and disables at 50%, otherwise our delivery might have been interrupted.

If you feel a little extra, you can exchange the infantry car for the armored train car. It has mg's on either side and a 360 traverse 40mm cannon for the Colonials, and holds 4 crew, which is probably a little overkill for antipartisan. Not sure about the Warden armored train, haven't ever seen one personally.

I will preface this section that I cannot control ultimately where people build track, and what they connect the network to. However, for those that recognize that some element of centralization helps the collective rail effort work well, due to how time and effort consuming maintenance is, I can at least advocate for prioritizing certain connections over others.



Where Rail Thrives

The single best application for Standard Gauge Trains is making up the difference where freighters cannot reach. Moving massive amounts of equipment from backline and midline logi towns to forward storage depots and seaports to help distribute equipment, making it accessible to frontline logi and fighters.

The second best connection worth making is any large facility that specializes in upgraded vehicle exports. Now let me specify, it is only necessary to those facilities that operate consistently and in volume. Small group facilities do not need rail access in the majority of circumstances, as they are not constantly producing. Vehicles that are produced in the MPF come in crates, those crates must be uncrated at a storage depot or seaport, and the individual vehicles must be transported in world to the facility, where they are upgraded to their desired variant, and shipped out of the facility either back to public storage or directly to storage near the front. This is a very effective system when manpower allows.

Where Rail is Ok

As specified previously, not all rail applications are worth the trouble. These are some of the cuts I advocate for:

Although the standard gauge trains excel at volume, I cannot recommend their use for resource gathering. This may come as a surprise to many users, as their merit for doing so seems proven. However, the amount of extra network that is required to maintain access to resource fields is too great. There are many players that exclusively use their trains to gather resources for their facilities, or for the refinery, and there are those that do so that do not help maintain the network, because they don't use most of it. Perhaps some readers will find that justifiable, but in my opinion those that use the tracks should help maintain them at least in the hex or hexes they are most active. This also leads to their trains having huge amounts of downtime, either parked at a resource node or at their facility when not in use.

The exception to this would probably be oil fields for mass petrol distribution. However, efforts to provide the front with "fuel depots" have struggled due to how inconvenient filling shipping containers with petrol is. Even with autoclickers, it is a mind numbing, time consuming process.

Not all logi towns need rail access. Axehead in Godscroft, for example, in an East/West war, should NOT get track. Period. If you want to connect rail to the rest of the network, you have to go north through Morgan's Crossing and all the way to The King to have a continent connection. It is not worth it! Ship equipment to Port of Rime and move it overland, or take the time to sail it all the way west. I would even argue that in Morgan's in that same scenario, you should only connect rail between Allsight and Quituss to access the seaport.

In that same vein, there are many, many storage depots that exist in between key logi points, between the backline and the frontline. In the past I made it a priority to attempt to connect as many of these storage depots as possible, but in hindsight they rarely were used and it was a waste of time doing so. Prioritize storage depots that are most active furthest back and furthest front, or major midline cities like Blemish, as an example.

Where Track is Unconscionable

Your Facility/Bunker Base does not need a rail connection. I have seen so, so many random small group or solo facilities, and so many bunker bases that are not facilities, attempt to integrate rail or build a balloon track adjacent. Please stop. In the majority of circumstances, you cannot take advantage of the volume provided by rail, and poor tracklaying can cause significant problems for regular rail traffic.

For example, a small group in a frontline hex attempted a facility, only to build their train on the mainline where the locomotive was destroyed by enemies. Although we were able to remove the offending train from the track and complete our delivery, it could have presented a significant threat if the armor column attacking the city we were supplying had flanked.

Likewise, many of these "branch lines", are poorly built and poorly marked, and the small groups that build them for their "personal" use typically struggle to maintain them, and many times attempt leaching off existing rail supply.

This is not a comprehensive list, but these are hexes that, depending on war orientaion, are really difficult to make use of trains and can largely be ignored.

North/South
Westgate (except for Longstone)
Oarbreaker
Farranac Coast
Fisherman's Row
Stonecradle
Allod's Bight
Tempest Islands

East/West
Pretty much all the same but add Godscroft and Cuttail in Basin

By narrowing our efforts to hexes that are especially not accessible by freighter, we can better compliment seagoing logi.

One of the biggest breaks in the chain keeping standard gauge trains from reaching their peak potential is the failure to integrate trains into the old school logi loops. This is certainly no ones fault, but rather exemplifies how difficult it has been to communicate to other players where and when trains are active to players that feel they are "outside" that gameplay loop.

A typical period of gameplay for the average solo logi is as follows:

• Do enough factory work to maintain a small stockpile
  
• Pull a freighter and fill 5 shipping containers from public/stockpile
  
• Sail to frontline, water accessible seaport
  
• Repeat

It is necessary, then, to communicate to these wonderful players of our efforts to secure content for overland shipping to destinations that are not accessible via water from their port of call. However, we run into 2 problems:
1. The disconnect between players that find driving trains/ships long distances entertaining
2. Filling shipping containers SUCKS!

When a player is engaging in the solo player shipping loop, they have a maximum expectation for containers to be filled, and then they get a break from assembly times by sailing. This doesn't necessarily work with trains, because they are faster and carry more cargo, there is an expectation for more shipping containers. It is not fair to outsource and offload the responsibility of assembling shippable goods to these logi players willing to put up with this terrible aspect of the game full time. No one should be expected to only fill shipping containers, and pulling exclusively from stockpiles only helps this so much, especially the public factory workers who do not use quickpulls.

The best solution I have found is just making an announcement in logi chat. Consistently the few times I have not assembled my shippables myself or with my regiment, and relied on pubs, I have found at least 1 person willing to help by assembling shipping containers. This can also be streamlined by pulling vehicle crates to finish of the train, instead of attempting to take full trains of shipping containers.

I will admit I do not have a perfect solution to this, but this is the area where trains excel most, and provide their biggest worth. If we as a faction cannot improve this logi chain, people who do not interact with trains regularly will continue to write them off.

It is worth noting as well that when conventional frontline logi sidestep and allow the trains through the queue, a train can deliver so much more cargo than a flatbed or hauler, but it does take more time. Truckers still have their place, but we've seen pictures of upwards of 10 trucks attempting to get into a hex, where one train could have gotten through much quicker.


Also, many railroad players have acknowledged the traffic and conflict between trains and conventional logi/truck drivers, especially in logi towns where the dev tracks are inconvenient. As such, there has been a priority placed by railroadmen to construct railyards or other alternative parking areas for trains that do not block traffic. If you are a trucker and see that the railroadmen in your hex have gone above and beyond to mitigate traffic and stay out of your way, please help them maintain the infrastructure that allows them to do so.

It goes without saying that Tracklayers and Bunker Builders are estranged brothers as far as gameplay is concerned. We have far more in common than anyone else, yet find ourselves at odds the most because of the failure of the developers to integrate bunker and railroad mechanics.

The following picture exemplifies a regular conflict. On the right edge is the dev bridge from Simo's Run to Silk Farms, in the center is the track builders' attempt to get through an existing chokepoint base. This would unfortunately be exacerbated later by their installation of a howitzer garrison, which would further delay trains to Silk Farms. By the time we could establish rail connection, we were able to get a total of 3 trains into the city before Simo's Run fell 2 or 3 days later.

There are far too many instances of bunkers being built directly in front of dev track and dev bridges, key logistical chokepoints that we as track layers MUST use. We have no tools for crossing water or significant terrain.

If you are a bunker builder, please make an attempt to integrate these new mechanics into your construction. All it takes is leaving a 10-15m gap in whatever chokepoint your filling, and a few defenses facing the new entrance. The rail does not need to go through your base, we recognize how inconvenient that is and most of the time we don't want our trains going through bunkers, either.

This does not have to continue being a conflict, and there is also an imbalance because we do not even unlock the ability to lay track until nearly half way through the war. Bunker installations are a necessary construction effort from day 1. With a little forethought we can mitigate stepping on each other's toes.

Just talk to people running trains.

It is not feasible, especially for new players, or group/regi unaffiliated players, to maintain large networks or manage trains on their own. While certainly not impossible, protection and maintenance become scaling problems that are much better handled at a group level.

The secret is that many railroad players are constantly looking to get people involved in their train operations. Tracklayers, drivers, crew, and support are almost always in demand. One of the worst feelings for people putting in the effort to maintain these networks and build these trains is to see them sit unused for extended periods of time. The more people willing to be communicative and put in the effort to get involved in trains, the more effective trains will be, and the better impression we can leave on other players.

Also, the understated heroes of the rails are those randos that don't do train logi, but are still willing to help out and donate gsupps. Your efforts have never gone unappreciated.

Soundboard

I don't remember the player's name who game me the idea, but if you run trains, get a soundboard. Now I know soundboards are generally frowned upon due to earrape and spam, but used appropriately and sparingly, they can make other player's day.

I personally use SoundPad on Steam, a very effective but simple soundboard with which I have a small collection of steam locomotive whistles to blast at people. Now I'll recognize that there are some players who don't appreciate it, but the absolute majority of players I've interacted with love it, because it gives presence and a sort of life to the trains that the game does not provide. Let's face it, the sound effect for the train whistle was already terrible (it's a modern diesel airhorn lmao) but after test war they nerfed its audio level to being near inaudible.

Do yourself and your local Foxhole players a favor and get a soundboard.

Communication and Organization Outside of Game

It is very difficult for players to get a big picture understanding of the rail layout every war because of a lack of ingame tools available. If you are interested in trains, talk to your faction members and find the central faction Discord that manages the rail network for your server. Players are more than willing and able to provide basic maps of the rail networks they maintain, and regularly give updates.

Here's some more screenshots that I wanted to add to show off our efforts.