Please excuse a possible double post, in case I missed this feature request / wish somewhere.

Support for Botania minecart:
Botania adds a "Minecart with Mana Pool" (mana-cart) to the rail system, allowing transport of Botania mana via a rail network.

It would be amazing, if this "Minecart with Mana Pool" was supported by Railcraft's already excellent handlers and detectors.
Cart Dispenser does not accept the mana-cart in it's inventory.
Train Dispenser does not accept the mana-cart in it's inventory.
Advanced Detector does not accept the mana-cart in it's filter.

Observed so far:
The mana-cart can be crowbar and track linked or unlinked, as any other cart and/or locomotive.
The Train Detector correctly detects the mana-cart as part of a linked train.
The Any Detector correctly detects the mana-cart as being there.

I placed the "Minecart with Mana Pool" (mana-cart) inside a normal vanila dispenser and used a ComputerCraft script to read the contents of the dispenser. The mana-cart is reported as having a raw_name of: "item.poolminecart". WAILA reports it as: "Botania:poolMinecart". I have no further data available.

Thank you Covert for giving us this excellent mod and for taking the time to keep giving us updates.

Sharidan

I do think it would be easier to have @Vazkii add support on their side, but I'm not sure.

Things are clear that Vasco does never want to support cart mods. See VazkiiMods/Botania#719

To be honest I'm not entirely sure from which side the code needs to be modified to support it, but my guess is that it's just a matter of appending existing filters in Railcraft to support it, if it's there. I could be wrong and I will gladly be proven wrong too. I'll let Sir CovertJaguar decide what he would like to do about this. If Sir CovertJaguar refers me to Vazkii, I'll gladly go have a talk with her :)

Well...most likely the issue is the Mana Pool cart Item doesn't extend the vanilla ItemMinecart or the Railcraft API IMinecartItem. Meaning that Railcraft has no idea the item is a Minecart.

I don't actually have a system in place for specifically whitelisting items since I assumed that one of the previous two statements would always be true.

Just for the record, it would be impossible to add a config option to whitelist specific items as minecarts, if that turns out to be necessary. Its kind of a pain for users though.

Could you make an IMinecart interface instead of having us implement ItemMinecart?

@Vazkii There is already one.
https://github.com/CovertJaguar/Railcraft-API/blob/master/mods/railcraft/api/core/items/IMinecartItem.java

Note it says that placeCart() is optional, but only if you don't want a dispenser to be able to place it.

My implementation can be found here:
https://github.com/CovertJaguar/Railcraft/blob/master/src/main/java/mods/railcraft/common/carts/CartUtils.java#L75-75

But it would take some adaption.

Awesome, I'll use that then

Thanks to the both of you for taking the time to have a look at this. It's greatly appreciated :)

Aah ok, well that makes sense.
I've been running a number of different tests the past few days, trying to get around the glitching invisible minecart and locomotive problem and also had a good chance to test out a lot of different Cart Dispenser setups for both spawning locomotives & carts, aswell as despawning them. The Cart Dispenser from Railcraft, can in fact de-spawn Vazkii's Manapool cart and eject it into pipes (I've been using both EnderIO item conduits and Thermal Dynamics itemducts), however the other way around doesnt work. I can't pipe the Manapool cart item back into the Cart Dispenser, just like I can't place the item in the Cart Dispenser through it's UI. If I get the code reference you are making correctly, that's because it doesnt inherit the Minecart item template, which then accounts for my observations of whitelisting-like events.

In any case, thank you for taking the time to check into this CovertJaguar. It's greatly appreciated. I'll go pester Vazkii about this :)