Hi everybody,

I have some problems with the powered rails.
Picture illustrating the problems: https://ibb.co/YRm76X5
Picture illustrating the non-connecting pole problem : https://ibb.co/3sJvWjX
Picturing showing the fgact that my railway and my pole stay on 2 different networks instead of connecting to each other (you'll need to zoom but you can see that the pole and the 22 factories are on network "3" and the railway is on a network with more than 5500 differents items): https://ibb.co/ykHXN34
Picture illustrating differents railways network problem: https://ibb.co/Tb13ZpX

First: When I put a factory just next to the rail, it works, so I know there is electricity in the rails, but when I try to connect a pole, it doesn't work. So I can't extend the electric network. How come? Any ideas?
[Of course I used the special pole made to connect rails to network ;-) ]

Second: I have many crossroads in my railway network, and it seems that the electricity doesn't spread in all the direction. Weirdly it spread sometimes but not all the time and it's quite a pickle ( :D ). When I show the networks, it seems that the game consider that there are different networks instead of one big. Maybe that's why electricity doesn't go through all the railways. Any ideas to solve it? I'ld like to have one big railway network not few small... :/ specially because I have problem to connect my poles to the rails...

BUT HERE IT BECOMES REALLY WEIRD, far away from the crossroad in pictures, in my most remoted iron mine that is at the end of my railway, not only do I have electricity near the ralis but the pole connects to the rails and I can provide power to my mine... Why does it sometimes work and sometimes don't?

Thanks for reporting this! I haven't been aware of it before, and I really can't think of a reason off the top of my head. It probably will take some time until I can figure this out (real-life work will demand some more time). However, I'll put it on the list of things I need to do. :-)

Finally got around to take a closer look at this. The problem is that powered rails are a piece of rail track with an invisible electric pole on it. These poles need to have a rather large maximum_wire_distance so they can also connect curved rails. Unfortunately, that also means that they will automatically connect to rather distant poles -- even across parallel tracks that don't touch anywhere. The problem is that each pole may only have 5 wires connecting to it. So, in some situations it could happen that a pole already has all possible connections in place when the track is extended, and can't connect to its direct neighbor. That would explain why some tracks forking off a junction don't get power.

I'm not sure yet what to do about this. Cutting all connections when a pole is placed, and looking for neighbors on the same rail track could be possible, but may make the lag on placing rails even worse.

OK, I think I've fixed this. If a powered rail is placed, I remove all wires from it. I check each end of the rail if it connects to another powered rail going left, straight, or right. If another powered rail is found, I connect the hidden poles.

This means there won't be cross connections between parallel tracks any longer. There is one thing to watch out for, though: A connection will be only made where a train driving on that rail can actually go. If two tracks are crossing each other, but trains can't go from one track to the other, you've effectively got two separate power networks. A Rail-to-power-connector placed next to both tracks can be used to connect the two networks.

Please check out version 0.17.55/0.18.24!