I'm just starting to design my first rail system(LHD), and I've encountered some issues while trying to design an intersection.
First, I couldn't figure out how to make a curve without first attaching to an existing rail which is problematic since nothing in the BP designer can connect with anything outside of it. I got around that by making a BP of just a single curve (after deleting the connecting piece).
The bug where the designer's bounding box doesn't visually match was easy to work around once I figured out what was happening. Hopefully the finished blueprint isn't cut off.
Apparently signals can't be placed on the ends of tracks. Being unable to attach more rails to these curves inside of the designer means that I have nowhere that the game will allow me to place signals.
Is there a way to make a more complete BP for intersections, or will they be mostly manual each time?
Edit: realized after I posted that the left and bottom curves are going to the wrong side. Glad I noticed before trying to use it.
In addition to the other tips here, I recommend having a two level rail system with one direction heading on one level and the opposite direction on a level above.
The pro is this way you don't have to worry about making intersections that cross over your main rail lines.
The con is that you have to build enough space to ramp up your track connections on level 2 but that's mitigated by just having around 2 train lengths of space length of space from the main rail before the train station
So it looks like this from the side
==========> Rails
---------------------- One meter foundation
At least 8 meters of space
<=========== Rails
----------------------- One meter foundation
A dual-level system did cross my mind, but the real drawback is that you'd have to remember which level is going e. g. north/east and south/west and place each signal on the correct side or rotate the blueprint the correct direction. Every. Time. Forgetting once will result in a signal being on the wrong side leaving no path for the trains to travel. I would forget frequently.
Yeah that tripped me up for a bit too. I colored my 1 m foundations so the top was Red for towards my home base and Green was for away. So I could follow the IALA region b red right returning guidance
I also use two blueprints for my rail construction that I alternate with to help make things flow
that has rails and rail signals built in
one that's just foundation
Assuming of course your train is south of the Huey P Long Bridge
The color coding wouldn't stop you from rotating the blueprint 180°. Do that one time, and you're stuck tracking down that one segment of track. If you can avoid that (or don't mind the troubleshooting) then awesome. I just know it'd frustrate me to no end.
It sounds like you are well on your way! Please feel free to ignore the rest of this post, I'm only writing in case it helps someone else one day.
I'm sorry that I didn't explain that my redundancy against that problem which was that I made the blueprints in the shape of an "L" from above where I always knew as I was building away from my base that the _1 m foundation part of the L shape was always to my characters right as I was facing down the | part of the L. I could clearly spot whenever the track was wrong when the spacing between _ foundations was off
I didn't care that it made the track look a little funky, and never really had times where the train rails would meet outside of the main hub base.