See Building Railway Depots for a detailed tutorial on how to build railway depots.
A view of the different depots - the bottom two are hangars
Depots are buildings where trains, road vehicles and ships are built, stored and serviced. Aircraft use hangars which have the same function as a depot but are only available as part of an Airports.
Depots have no limit on the size or number of Vehicles they can hold at one time. (So they can be used, for example, as Escape depot in front of a Railway station)
Railway Depots have a built-in two way signal (it works as a entry pre-signal in a pre-signal set).
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Usage
A Railway Depot
To view inside a depot or a hangar, click on it. You will be presented with a window showing any vehicles in the depot/hangar.
Clicking on a vehicle will open the window of that vehicle. A Right-Click will show the name and capacity of the vehicle. For trains a Right-Click while holding Ctrl will show the total capacity of the train, starting with the vehicle that was clicked on until the end of the train.
Clicking New Vehicles will present you with a list of available vehicles, which you may then build by clicking Build Vehicle.
Servicing
Vehicles will periodically return to a depot to be serviced. Whenever a vehicle is serviced, its reliability rating is reset to the maximum possible value for that vehicle type. As soon as a vehicle leaves its depot, its reliability score will immediately start dropping again, and hence its chances of suffering a breakdown will gradually increase.
Reliability scores drop at a constant rate for any given vehicle. If the vehicle is very old its reliability score will degrade much more quickly. If a vehicle model is obsolete (i.e. one no longer available for purchase), its maximum reliability score will also begin to drop. This represents the problem of finding spare parts for very old models, and it affects the reliability of all vehicles of a given type even if they are serviced regularly - and even if they remain in the depot.
You can put a depot on the Orders list for a vehicle (in the same way you would a Stations) to force it to be serviced at a particular point in its journey. (For example, you might force a train to be serviced before it entered a particularly busy station. This doesn't guarantee that it won't break down, but it does minimise the risk.)
Options available in a "go to depot" order.
And you may use the "service" option ("Service if needed") on a go to depot order to have the vehicle execute that order only if it needs to be serviced. Vehicles can also be ordered to stop in the depot. See Allow goto depot orders page for further information.
Depots by transport types
- Railway: See the railway construction tutorial: Building depots
- Roads: See the road construction tutorial: Building road depots
- Tramways: See Tramways
- Waterways: See the waterways construction tutorial: Building ship depots
- Airports: See hangars in the airport construction tutorial: Buying aircraft