track design problems

[bill63]

Have recently bought railmaster and looking forward to using it. I have read most of the issues and very knowledgable replies on the forum. I have experienced a number of these issues and not being very computer literate find the replies very informative.

My main issue now is one that was posted in July regarding the design module not responding or running very very slowly. I run railmaster only on a laptop. Downloaded evaluation version on my pc yesterday and all running fine including beeps when clicking

on icons.(which i also dont get) Reply to this problem was to download RailMaster.exe file and did help this person. Q. do i just download the file directly or do i have to delete the other file first.

[Hornby Customer Care]

Hi Bill63,

Please make sure RailMasteris closed. Open Internet Explorer and download from www.powerpos.com/rail-master/railmaster.exe

This installs the latest version of the software (currently 1.22). In XP, a window will appear asking you

whether they want to run or save the update. In Vista and 7 it is less obvious with a box appearing at the bottom of the web browser asking what you would like to do, press the small down arrow to the right of “Save” and choose “Save as”.

In either

XP, Vista or 7 choose “Save as” and navigate to C:\Program Files\RailMaster folder (C:\Program Files (x86) in the case of 64 bit versions of Windows) and save the file, overwriting the existing file.

[St1ngr4y]

Like Bill63, I too have just recently bought an Elite and Railmaster on a CD. I have successfully installed Railmaster on a Windows XP system, acivated it, and successfully upgraded it to v1.3. However, when I go into the Track Plan Designer, according

to Windows Task Manager, Railmaster suddenly starts using 51% of the cpu, even before a track plan has been loaded!! It takes ages to load a plan and manipulation of the elements is very slow. Am I the only one to experience this? Is there a cure?

[SlimController]

I, too, am having some problems with the Track Plan Designer. It seems to have a mind of its own. Part way through designing a diagram it suddenly decides to freeze and then change the scale. Sometimes it loses the triangular infills that connect the diagonal

elements. Most recently it has decided to shift the largely completed diagram half a square down on the grid, so that any attempt now to edit or add new elements fails because they won’t line up. This is all on a Celeron notebook (running Win XP) that I am

using to control my model railway up in the loft.

I thought this might be the consequence of using a slow computer and so I could make my life easier on the design front by doing this work, and maybe sorting out a few control programs, on the much faster

Win 7 desktop in my (also rather warmer) study, and then just copy over the .pln and other files to the notebook computer up in the railway room. But first I needed to activate the evaluation copy of Railmaster I had on the desktop, so that I could fill in

all the sets of points on the diagram, and write programs of more than 10 lines. No luck -“The software has already been registered.” Yes, I know, I did it yesterday on the notebook. Am I expected to shell out another £65, just to be able to do my design work

on a faster computer with a bigger screen? Or am I expected to go through all the nausea of deactivating it on the notebook and activating it on the desktop whenever I want to do some more design work? What if in the middle of the design I want to check something

by running the railway for a few minutes? More deactivation / activation to gain control of the locomotives? None of this seems very user-friendly, so I am obviously missing something. How do I achieve my objective, which is just to make my use of the (fairly

expensive) Railmaster program features easy, certainly not to pirate it for use on somebody else’s railway?

[St1ngr4y]

I think you and I have experienced exactly the same problems. Can anyone, especially Hornby, tell us whether another upgrade is due which clears these obvious program bugs?

[Graskie]

Hi SlimController! Welcome to the real world! It took me 6 months to get anywhere near what you are trying to achieve, with my RailMaster/Elite setup. I would tell you how I eventually managed to do it, but.........I forget!

[SlimController]

Graskie - yes, I know all about that "I forget" thing. When I used to run a small network in the office I found the only way to avoid constantly reinventing the wheel was to make fairly copious notes as I was maintaining it. Time consuming when I was doing

it, but saved a lot of time in the end when problems recurred.

From reading other posts on here, it looks as if I am knocking my head on a brick wall expecting to be able to use Railmaster on more than one of my computers at a time. Incidentally, I

have just loaded again, but on the fast computer, the diagram I sweated two hours to produce on the notebook - mine is a fairly complex track layout - only to find the unbidden changing of scale has occurred again, this time jumbling up much of the layout...And

it all looked so good in the evaluation before I splashed out my money! Does give me pause about automating all my points if I am not going to be able to get Railmaster to control them properly. On the plus side, I am currently able to control 8 trains successfully

from the notebook screen. No glitches there yet.

As St1ngr4y asks, Mr Hornby, is there a software upgrade on the way to deal with these track diagram bugs?