What are smart rails?

A smart rail system is a minecart rail network that enables travel directly from any station to any other non-stop. It employs redstone circuitry to send information about your destination along with you, which is used to route you to your final destination. This is in contrast to a traditional point to point rail network, where each rail only connects you to one destination. There have been several smart rail implementations on PvE over the few years, including CARBON, Pico Rails, Rose intracity, and most recently, CARBON lite.

Since each connected city immediately gets access to every other connection, the benefit over traditional point to point rails grows exponentially. A smart rail network of 8 stations facilitates 56 unique routes. With 16 stations, you have the equivalent of 240 point to point rails. Go up to 32 connections and you can travel 992 different routes!

A brief look back

This past revision (R17), we built CARBON lite. It consists of 16 stations connected to four cardinal lines with address space for a total of 32 stations. Here is some fun trivia:

• Our redesigned stations, exchanges, and relays are roughly 70% smaller than traditional CARBON and 100% piston-less (and thus silent).
• Everything above ground: No more crude redstone tunnels, we've opted to package our tiny relays within the track halfpipe and showcase our 9x9 exchange systems in glass towers.
• 246 data relay units are distributed along our nearly 16 kilometers of track. The distributed memory represents a total of 1230 bits, roughly 153 bytes or 0.15 kb.
• Spawn station has serviced 1492 departures and dispensed 325 free carts.

None of this would have been possible without the support and cooperation of our uniquely benevolent community. Thanks to everyone who helped reserve right of way, donated supplies, and assisted with the construction of our extensive road and rail halfpipe.

lite rail: the flattening

Once again, we have reenvisioned the smart rail and this time, it's flat. All of the redstone circuitry, including the data relays and exchange logic, now runs in a 5x1 conduit within the track. This new incredibly compact design will alleviate demand on resources and enable us to get operational even faster.

Since this is a complex and finely tuned redstone system, it is imperative that we maintain a straight track. As such we need your help to ensure right of way along the planned route. This rev we are planning to take the same footprint as CARBON lite, with four cardinal lines running map wide along X136 and Z136. We kindly request that you avoid building within 8 meters of the X136 and Z136 lines.

As always, a smart rail network of this scale could never exist without the massive amount of help we get from volunteers and donors. You don't have to know redstone to be able to help. Most of the help we need right away is clearing and claiming land, and building the road and track bed. The faster we get that done the faster we can start putting in the redstone and getting people connected. If you'd like to volunteer, please join our clanchat #lite or speak with drtmv, torteela, or DjentleGiant directly.

Materials needed include

• stone, cobblestone, stonebrick, stone slabs
• redstone
• quartz (not blocked!), comparators
• glowstone, redstone lamps, sea lanterns, end rods
• iron, rails
• gold, powered rails
• spruce
• stained hard clay (red, yellow, lime, and light blue only), hardened clay, clay
• glass, sand

Donation chests will be located just outside of spawn. Any and all donations are greatly appreciated. We can't do this without you!

Finally, if you're part of a city interested in connecting to the lite rail network, you may indicate your interest in this thread but please do not build your connection until you are assigned a connection point. We'll be making another post in the coming weeks to walk you through the process of getting connected, including getting assigned an ID and schematics to build your branch.

Thanks for reading. Let's make rev 18 the best yet! // drtmv