Stations

From OpenTTD

Stations are the most important part of any network. They are where cargo is collected and loaded onto vehicles. Each mode of transport has its own type of station:

• Railway Stations are used by trains. The basic station layout remains the same for all types of railway.
• Airports are the loading and unloading points for aeroplanes. There are many types of airport including heliports for helicopters.
• Docks are where your ships berth.
• Loading Bays are where buses and trucks load and unload their cargo.

[edit] Combining stations

Stations you place directly adjacent to one another (of any kind) will combine to form one logical station. That is, they share their cargo acceptances, name and pool of cargo to be collected. They of course maintain their physical location and layout. So for example, you could have a train station with a bus station attached - the bus station would share a pool of cargo with the train station, but allow passengers to be picked up and dropped off by buses as well as trains.

You can combine stations for many reasons:

• To set up a feeder service where one mode of transport transfers cargo to another, which takes it on to its new destination
• To extend the catchment area of a station (up to the size given in the Maximum station spread setting)
• To alleviate overcrowding on a station with additional terminals

Combined stations need not be physically adjacent to each other - at least not in the long run. You can build a chain of stations and delete intermediate links in that chain, and the "detached" stations will still be part of the same logical station.

From 0.7.0-beta1 onward you can also build combined stations by Ctrl-leftclicking when placing a new station. A popup window will ask which station you want to join to, or build a new station.

[edit] Deleting combined stations

You can remove a component of a combined station using the dynamite tool which will remove just that individual station, not the overall thing. The exception to this is train stations, where dynamiting one part of a train station will remove all of them (or not, if there are trains in any of them). To remove these, you should select the station tool and then the digger tool which will allow you to remove train stations one tile at a time.

Care should be taken if deleting part of a combined station that is physically separate from the rest of the combined station if you want to replace it afterwards. Simply replacing it will create a new, separate logical station - to keep it attached you will either have to link-and-delete out from one of the attached stations, or starting from OpenTTD 0.7.0-beta1 you may press the Ctrl key when left clicking, then selecting the original station.