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I have a long section of rail that I'd like to serve with a single minecart. If I left the minecart on the other end of the railway, I'd like to push a button to have it sent over to the station I am at.

Thus far I've been able to accomplish this with redstone and repeaters, but I've noticed that repeaters only work one-way; I've looked at some online documentation and have found a schematic for two-way repeaters, but it requires quite a bit of real estate and my railway is elevated high off the ground so I'd like to keep land (and resource) usage to a minimum.

Is there something I'm missing about repeaters? Is there a small schematic for making them bidirectional?

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Could you give a link to the large repeater you found? – OrigamiRobot Jun 16 '11 at 5:07
@OrigamiRobot: Added. – fbrereto Jun 16 '11 at 5:50
You aren't missing anything about repeaters. They are only supposed to work in one direction (like a diode). The only other bidirection design I can find is this: youtube.com/watch?v=Bhy4XjidPDQ . Seems even less space efficient. – OrigamiRobot Jun 16 '11 at 6:07

3 Answers

up vote 5 down vote accepted

I'm not necessarily sure that it is the most space-effective solution, but it's probably the method for making it look the nicest, and it's certainly the easiest: Run two wires; one each way.

Edit: As a side note; if the stations are too far away from one another, what you are planning won't work in any case; and building a rail in that fashion requires a lot of boosters. (Depending on your need for speed a rail traversable by unoccupied or freight carts requires 5-10 times as many booster tracks as one for PAX transport.)

Unless this is an automated freight line a more practical and resource-friendly approach is probably to have a couple of extra minecarts in a chest at each station.

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up vote 2 down vote

Here's a YouTube clip of a two directional repeater that doesn't require a reset ( functioning as closely to the normal repeater setup as possible).

Watch the whole video if you need step by step instructions; I set the time to when he throws up the condensed picture version.

It has a little less delay and it uses a difference principle. With the redstone update coming, having a system that isn't based on power levels would be handy if that mechanism gets an overhaul.

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This would be a better answer if it described the key points of the video, which may be taken down in the future. – KatieK Dec 19 '12 at 19:48
up vote 1 down vote

Can't you just connect two repeaters in a loop? Or does that start a clock?

 ┌─>│
─┤  ├─
 │<─┘
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This starts a clock. – OrigamiRobot Jun 16 '11 at 7:06
@OrigamiRobot: Even if you make one have a longer delay than the other? – Eric Jun 16 '11 at 7:10
You should be able to do this if you use a couple of extra repeaters (since they only flow in one direction) to prevent a clock from starting. – TM. Oct 8 '11 at 20:36
with a short delay they both lock on. haven't tried using the longer delay settings. – frankster Dec 5 '11 at 19:18

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