Argh! My coal mine won't produce

[andness]

This is the third time I have this problem so I’m frustrated now. After getting of to a good start I have a good chunk of the northern part of my map developed. I then found 3 cities clustered in a triangle around a coal mine. A little bit north of the coal mine was an iron ore mine, and bit further north of that was a steel mill. Perfect.

So I set up a train going from the coal mine to the steel mill, with the iron ore delivered by trucks to the train station. Then I set out goods delivery lines to the 3 nearby cities which together should generate a pull of about 100 goods. I bought a train capable of carrying 78 coal/iron and 78 goods.

And then the damn coal mine won’t produce. The iron ore is coming, slowly, but no coal. So after 4 years the production from the iron ore mine is 5, and the steel mill ditto. I notice that there is a very slow trickle of coal coming to the steel mill from a coal mine far far north of it which is the source of my other steel mill.

My coal/iron train has a frequency of 6 minutes, so pretty damn fast.

So rather than get the coal that I can deliver in about 3 minutes, the steel mill prefers the coal that arrives in something like 15. I mean, what the hell?

[jorgenRe]

Have you checked if you may have used a passenger station instead of a cargo station. It is a common mistake which ofcourse i and others would have wish to be notified about 🙂

[andness]

Hehe, it wouldn’t be the first time I made that mistake, but in this case I did not. I’ve now set up a truck route on the “slow” coal route, and that somehow kicked my coal mine into action. The problem is that it produces 3 coal, and the steel mine is still hovering around 5-7 production. They just don’t seem to detect the pull.

[jorgenRe]

IS the cities you are tryeing to supply already supplied by another industry, if not then just trye and see if another train on the line helps. BTW what is your current frequency at?

 

[Varana]

Maybe run an extra check on the goods lines to make sure they’re working properly – frequency, demand, placing of stations, etc. In my experience, it’s often best to think TF production chains backwards: start with the end, and once that’s working, ensure that it pulls the raw materials with it.

[kimmaz]

did you connect the ttrain station at the coal mine with ROAD to the road along the coal mine? The coal have to travel TO the station!!!

[isidoro]

Apart from the items pointed out before, consider that frequency isn’t the only quantity to check.  Imagine a frequency of 6 min., but with 6 vehicles in the line.  In that case, the piece of goods has to wait an average of 3 min. for a vehicle to arrive plus (6 by 6/2 = 36/2)  18 min, travel time.  That makes 21 min => that line won’t be chosen…

 

[andness]

Thanks for all the responses. To clarify a few things:

1. The cities were not supplied by other cargo
2. The frequency for the goods routes to the cities were all <2min (2-3 trucks)
3. The train frequency was 6min, and I use a single big train.

After staring at my non-producing coal mine for a while I noticed that *south* of the coal mine there was another steel mill. So I simply set up a new rail down there. It ended up with the same frequency for the train (6 min), and lo and behold, production started.

I changed nothing else than the train line.

But, the southern steel mill was fairly close to a city. This city was the first to start pulling production from the steel mill. So it’s as if the setup I had was to “complicated” for the chain to get going, but once there was a nearby city production started up. And once production started the other cities started pulling as well.

To me this is a bug since the cargo delivery times were the same in both cases.

[RAAndre]

Maybe I am alone in my thinking, but perhaps at the medium or hard levels these mathematical calculations are necessary, but in the easy version sometimes I just want to run my trains and have them work!

(More like Locomotion)

 

[Azrael]

How long does it take for the iron ore delivery trucks to deliver the iron ore to the train station?
If it takes so long, that only a few units of iron reach the steel mill along with an equal number of coal units, it produces also very few good units.

Imho, you should also let a train transport the iron directly to the steel mill without a detour over the coal mine.

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