for me it’s “pickup - copper”, or “drop - iron plate - iron beam”. That way when I am assigning routes to trains, I can sort by pickup and drop-off easily. Took me a long, long time to realize that stations could have the same names and the trains would just go to whichever was most convenient.

Ah, I think I may have used in/out inversely to you when I set up trains.

“copper in” is where copper is put “into” the train system “copper out” is where copper is dropped

I also use “in” and “out”, in combination with rich text. For example, iron ore stations might be:

[IRON ORE RICH TEXT] 1-4 Iron Ore - Out [IRON ORE RICH TEXT] 1-4 Iron Ore - In

Where the “Out” station is at the resource patch (ore comes out of the ground) and “In” is at the base (ore goes in to the factory). I also include the train type in my station names (1-4).

See https://lemmy.ml/comment/686775 for what I mean by rich text

I had a very short and consistent scheme for a while. No text, just icons.

{materiel icon}{chest icon}

For example, one station provides iron plates to the rail network (loads onto train), the other requests crude oil from the rail network (unloads from train):

Downsides: Some uncommon icons can be hard to read. Some liquids are similar in color and hard to identify when seen alone.

So later we changed to a better readable format. Examples:

[L] Iron Plates

[U] Crude Oil

Removed by mod

My template is always Coal mine -> Coal drop. It’s shorter than “load/unload”, but may sound strange when transporting circuits or similar.

I use LTN, so I don’t change them. Makes for an interesting map.

I normally do [Function] - [Location/Base Name]:

• Iron Pickup - SE
• Iron Pickup - Northern Defense
• Iron Dropoff - Main Base

Gets more and more important as the number of bases increase.