Changing order of Railmaster Groups

[cowside]

When you add groups in Railmaster it lists them in the order they were added - not alphabetically. Anyone know how to alter the order in the listing (apart from deleting the lot and adding them again in the order you want, or editing the Access database). Apologies if this has been aired before, but without a useful search it is impossible to find out whether it has been discussed previously..  

[KPJunk]

Please forgive for not answering your question but seeing you mention the access database , I have been meaning to ask for some time about it .

Can someone confirm if a copy of the access file is able to be read by Microsoft access. Everytime I have tried , I get a file not compatible message or similar . I am now using access 2016 version. 

Thanks 

Keith 

[Britannia Builder]

CS, I wasn't aware of loco groups, but following your post I've taken a look at them. The group names appear to be stored in a file Groups.dat, which is a plain text file that you can edit in Notepad - they are not in the Access database. The file is created when you first set up a group. I tried editing the file to change the order of the groups, and this does resequence the list on the screen, but unfortunately the group name(s) on each loco seem to be held as the position number in the original list rather than the name, so the group names on the locos are then mixed up. The group number(s) for each loco are held in a column 'LocoGroup' in the Resource.mdb file, so can't easily by changed except by deleting all the groups and starting again.

 

Keith, I can read Resource.mdb in my old 2003 version of Access (on Windows 10), but it dosn't allow updates (I suspect the database has been patched in some way to prohibit this, which is quite understandable). It can also be read in Excel, but not updated except by writing some VBA macros which I did in order to edit the speed curves.

 

Regards, John

[Britannia Builder]

Sorry, I was mistaken in my previous post - the loco groups appeared to have been mixed up when I tried resequencing Groups.dat, but on actually checking the contents of the LocoGroup column in Resource.mdb it does contain a list of the group names rather than their positions in the list. So reordering the Groups.dat does now seem to work (although the list of groups against each loco in the loco setup screen is still in the original order). Don't know what I did wrong the first time.

 

Regards, John

[cowside]

Thanks for that. Didn't look at groups.dat - that extension is often for a system file! Will check it out.

The reason groups are so important (and this has been the subject of various threads) is that above a certain number of locos (maybe 60?) the only way to add new locos is by adding them into a group. This workaround was found after lots of frustration and wasted time adding and deleting locos which appear to be there but do not then work!