CLIPTextEncode_motorway_edition

You already know CLIPTextEncode: you type a prompt, feed it a CLIP model, and get the conditioning your KSampler eats. This _motorway_edition variant is that same node, surgically rewired so both its input and its output travel through a shared "motorway" bag instead of individual wires. The prompt box still works exactly like you expect - but now the CLIP it encodes comes out of the pipe, and the resulting conditioning gets dropped back into the pipe under a key.

It's part of agilly1989's ComfyUI_agilly1989_motorway pack, a beta "pipe" implementation for ComfyUI. Think of the motorway as a dict that rides along the graph: a MotorwayStart node creates an empty one, Motorway AxB nodes write values in and read them out by string key, and each _motorway_edition node is an auto-generated clone of a core node that plugs into that same bus. You trade a wall of spaghetti wires for a single MOTORWAY connection and a set of key strings. The name on the wire is literally MOTORWAY 🚌💨, which tells you everything about the sense of humor here.

The three fields that matter

The full schema is small. You get a MOTORWAY 🚌💨 input (the bag), and then three things to set:

• text - the prompt, a multiline box. This is the one you'll actually type in. Nothing has changed from the core node.
• INPUT_clip_key (default clip) - which key in the motorway the CLIP model is stored under. If you dropped a checkpoint's CLIP into the bag under the default key elsewhere on the motorway, leave it alone.
• OUTPUT_CONDITIONING_key (default CONDITIONING) - which key the finished conditioning gets written to. Whatever reads the result next (a sampler, a conditioning combine, a regional area node) pulls from this key.

The single output is the motorway itself. That's the whole trick of these nodes: every _motorway_edition node returns the bag, so you chain them in one long line and values pass along by key rather than by dragging wires.

Mechanically, the node calls the original CLIPTextEncode underneath - the text encoder, the 77-token boundary, all of it is the stock ComfyUI behavior. It just fetches the clip from the bag with MOTORWAY.get("clip"), runs the encode, stores the result with MOTORWAY.update("CONDITIONING", ...), and hands back a clone of the bag. One gotcha baked into the design: keys are write-once-when-written, last writer wins, so if two nodes on the motorway write to CONDITIONING, the later one silently overwrites the earlier one.

Install and the honest warnings

Install is trivial because the pack is pure Python with no extra dependencies and no model downloads:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/agilly1989/ComfyUI_agilly1989_motorway

Then restart ComfyUI. Or use ComfyUI Manager and search for ComfyUI_agilly1989_motorway.

Before you build a whole workflow on it, know what you're signing up for. This is a single-author beta project; the README's own banner reads "BIG BROKEN WITH ASYNC WILL FIX WHEN I GET THE TIME/MOTIVATION." The _motorway_edition clones were generated in one automated pass (pack v1.1.0, Feb 2025), and in newer releases the author disabled the clone loader entirely because it broke under ComfyUI's async execution. If you install the pack fresh today you'll see MotorwayStart and the Motorway AxB ramps, but you may not see this node at all - check your menu before you commit to it. If you still want the clones, you can uncomment the clone import in __init__.py and rename prestartup_script.py.disabled back, but you're on your own from there.

And if you ever hit 'MotorwayClass' object has no attribute 'hash_', that's the pack telling you a key doesn't exist in the bag yet - usually a typo, or a node downstream running before whatever writes the key. That error is the motorway's whole failure mode, and it's exactly why pipe-style routing like this divides the community: it's tidy until it isn't, and then it's a guessing game about which string was misspelled.