Locomotives are mainly for long range transfer, you can argue that tesseracts/ender chests are better, but carts are a lot more fun (I don't care that much about what I get from a given process, but how much fun it is to build. You just have cart which will slowly unload its cargo until all of it is processed and then it will go back for more, without any overflow problems. It is for example the easiest way to keep machine stocked with given amount of items and a lot cheaper/less laggy than manager. Of course tesseracts will be less laggy, but they don't have as much possibilities as cart loaders/unloaders (of course it is accompanied with undecipherable GUI, which should have special ingame instruction just WTF everything is doing). The tanks are pretty much the only reason to use Railcraft, and even then the lag they generate checking to see if they are whole many times per second is somewhat troublesome.Ĭlick to expand.Well, carts are less laggy than pipes, you have one entity with up to 27 stacks of items moving around, also I play minecraft without sound, so cart sounds don't bother me. There's nothing to do with the steam either, integration with BC/IC2 is basically giving up. Steam engines explode on their own unless properly regulated. Boilers require immense amounts of resources to capitalize on and cannot simply be turned on and off as more efficient energy sources can. Locomotives aren't especially useful when powered carts get the same mileage and booster rails remove the need for fuel. DW20 includes Steve's Carts for this reason, but that mod is problematic in other ways. Third, it does nothing with the carts beyond transportation. This would not normally be an issue, but pipes do not require a whole industrial base (coke oven, engine, rolling machine) to make.

Second, it makes getting rails more difficult. Forget riding the carts, chunk load errors abound at high rates of speed and high speed rail isn't (servers don't tend to load chunks that quickly). The first and most glaring issue of Railcraft is that its principal reason for being, making rails and carts more useful, was rendered obsolete a long time ago with the addition of pipes (and more recently, tesseracts). As it stands I can only comment on Railcraft in context of the DW20 modpack. I wish Traincraft was in more than just one modpack.

Traincraft rail map