Making a Station With Redstone Booster Track

Question

Now I have finished my underwater tunnel I have built somewhere for my railway to stop at. The cart comes in from the left, hits the booster and then hits the sloped booster track (unpowered). I am supposed to hit the button, powering both track sections which releases the cart and boosts me off to the right, where another booster sends me off to a bridge under construction. On the way back it hits a booster, then is suppoed to halt on the downwards slope until I push the button...although it doesn't happen. If the cart is travelling at a slow speed (empty or occupied) then it will halt like this, as expected.

Currently, after it hits the booster it will zoom past the halt leaving me to jump out at the right point and smash the minecart to stop it running away.

Is there a way of making sure that the cart stops, or should (can) I engineer a method to bypass the booster on the inbound approach to the station?

(this is as about as advanced as I get with redstone, so feel free to suggest contraptions with pressure plates and such, but my ability to understand, less implement them may be very low indeed)

Answer 1

My suggestion would be to change the normal rail at the bottom of the dip into a powered rail. This also removes the need for two pieces of Redstone dust, as one would power the whole section.

You don't need to use Redstone to bypass that on the way in; you could simply build something like this (it might take you a bit to manipulate the tracks like this):

Answer 2

If that's the end of the line, I would suggest this method that is (in terms of gold a lot!) cheaper then Kevin Y's:

When arriving, the booster track will send the cart up the slope and it will stop at the block.

When leaving, approach from behind to give it a small push and jump in as soon as it starts moving. The booster track will send you on your way.

To exit without the cart shooting back down the track, face where you came from, exit the cart, and walk 2-3 blocks down the track before turning.

Answer 3

If you don't mind using a bit more of resources, you could create a mechanism to stop the train using detector rails and redstone, like this:

provided that the train enters the station already sped up.

Placing the blocks like this

the train will activate the detector and will disable the powered rails in the center, just like this

and the train will stop when it arrives at the deactivated rails.

Notice how the redstone torch is placed on top of a block and the redstone "wire" is placed one block below: this way, if the wire receives a signal it will deactivate the torch, which will, therefore, cut the power to the rails and lead the cart to stop.

If the distance between the powered rails and the detector rail is longer, you might need to add one or more redstone repeaters to cause a delay, so the powered rails will only deactivate when the cart arrives on top of them.

Once stopped, the rails will activate again but the cart will not move because it needs a boost to start moving. To start moving again, you just need to provide that boost, by either pushing the cart or by pressing W while facing the direction you want to go.