Mini Cargo Station Strip (Functional)
This is a “mini cargo station” / cargo loading bay / cargo strip. It has a footprint of 16×2 tiles and it’s construction and maintenance costs are at a fraction of the full-fledged vanilla variant.
This was created using BloodyPenguin’s Cargo Train Terminal Template. Credits go to him for making this possible.
There is a certain “leaky” behaviour when it comes to the station. Leave 5 Tiles beyond the outer track of the station free of train tracks to circumvent this. Bunch them together like in the screenshot with a cargo terminal to profit from this. Or just build the exact same thing in your city as in the screenshot for a functional 9-track 5-truck terminal cargo station.
For the curious: The spawn point target and position markers are defaulted from the template, no matter how I set them in the asset. This is about 3.5 tiles beyond the outer track at the horizontal center (the original placement from the original 16×8 footprint). That’s why it “leaks”. If the placement from the spawn point markers is actually saved when using the asset editor, even smaller, terminal 16×1 cargo station strips may be possible. One of the pictures shows how this works in the configuration from the screenshot. Of course, if you know how to exploit this properly, you can create an even more efficient cargo station . Like, for example, two strips facing opposite directions so that the spawn points overlap on the tracks. You could then use the spawn point swapper, also by BloodyPenguin, to make the other station have its trucks leave in the right road direction again, but I’ve never tried this. The leaky behaviour also has the side effect that normal or one-way train tracks are declared as station stops by the game, but only if they are four tiles or closer. There may or may never be a fix for this, at least not until there is a game or mod tool update.