St1ngr4y

It makes you wonder why we bother offering help ......

Should be able to get it to work with a Hornby eLink as well. Ray

Hi John, do you have RM set to “set all points on startup”? If not, give that a try. Ray

Do you have the words “on/off” at the end of the description of the lights function? Ray

Hi Rob, You reminded me that I hadn't updated the Utility program to cater for the latest addition to the INI file "Expand plan=x". Is this what you had in mind ... Just need to update the Utility documentation too ... Ray

How much easier it would be if all of the INI file settings were on another couple of “tabs” in this window!!

Hi Dave, I was hoping to be able to confirm your findings by temporarily changing to the Metal theme. However, I was able to insert a loco button ok, with the description field enabled. Also, the green tick when pressed, reduced the button editing window to the smaller size as here ... The only observation which I would make is that the text insertion point is invisible in the field itself. Could this be what made you think it was disabled? The reason I ask is because if no text is typed into the description field, pressing the green tick causes a windows Beep sound to be played, and the window stays at its full size, rather than shrinking as above. With Metal theme, try clicking on the description field, then, even though you might think it is disabled, try typing in a description. Ray

Hello cjb, Do you have a specific question about loco detection or were you hoping to start a general discussion? So far, loco detection hardware from Hornby isn’t available, even though Railmaster caters for it. Ray

Hi Dave, In order to investigate your problem, I changed the name, temporarily, of one of my locos, whose address is 14, to the same as yours i.e. 298.14. I then tried to create a button for this loco on the button bar, and it worked fine ... The item appeared in the dropdown list of locos exactly as you created it manually i.e. address followed by 2 spaces then the loco name. Also, the description box for the button was enabled, allowing me to enter the Description of my loco. So sorry, couldn't help really. Ray

Hi John, Please feel free to email me at any time. I'll see what I can do. Ray

Hi Graham, It is a Hornby R8239, but you may have to go to eBay for it, because I don’t think Hornby are selling them any longer. I should point out that it doesn’t have a reset switch so pulling then re-inserting the power supply cable is the “usual “ way to reset. I got around this by adding a “push-to-break” button into the power supply cable. Ray

Hello Graham, welcome to the Forum. I have two eLinks set up on Railmaster, A connected the track bus, which includes locos and TrainTech signals, which plug into the track. Controller B is used exclusively for points accessory decoders. The only out-of-the-ordinary part of the setup is that I have a power booster installed between Controller A and the track bus, which means that any short circuits caused by, for example, derailments, result in the power booster tripping out, and the eLink remains operational. There is an entry in the INI file - "Reset eLink on start=1 1=reset the eLink controller on RailMaster start-up. 0 turns this off" I find that Controller A (but not B) resets on startup every time, irrespective of this setting. Also, the small red button which appears on the larger "All Stop" button, only works on Controller A, which is reasonable since Controller A is more likely to trip because of short circuits than Controller B. Do you have this configuration already or are you contemplating moving to this? Ray

Hi John, As Roger & Fishy have said, it is only a length of track with no points on it which you are trying to represent. I don't know whether your helix is single- or double-track, but I am assuming that the bottom of the helix leads to low level storage sidings which physically are directly below the upper level part of the layout. So how about something like this ... Ray

The Railmaster section of the Forum has a thread entitled "Desirable Features for future Railmaster releases". I was wondering whether there could be a similar thread for features of the Forum in general...... well actually, there is now !!!!! I'll start off by referring to a post I made earlier today in the Railmaster section. The post contains a two-column table of numbers, with headings Address Seq. During the writing of the post, I entered 4-digit numbers in the first column under the heading Address and 1 or 2 digit numbers in the second column under the word Seq. In order to get the second column of numbers directly under the word Seq, I inserted a string of 6 spaces between the two numbers on each individual line, and it looked fine until I posted it. After the post, I discovered that multiple consecutive spaces had been converted to a single space, so my two columns of numbers both appeared directly under the word Address. So my first "Desirable Feature" is either to stop replacing multiple spaces by a single space or to allow use of the tab character to allow a skip to the next tab stop in the text. Ray

Hello Charles, Welcome to the Forum. The R8247 accessory decoder has an inbuilt Capacitor Discharge Unit to give the points motor a kick when fired, and this is shared by all four ports on the R8247. Once fired, the C.D.U. needs 2 or 3 seconds to recharge itself for the next points firing. Railmaster has a file associated with it called Railmaster.ini, and this contains a setting relevant to the firing of points by Railmaster .... Points timer=0.75 No of seconds to pause between firing points rapidly Unfortunately, this default value of 0.75 isn't long enough to allow the CDU to recharge if the next point is attached to a different port on the same R8247. The easiest way to remedy this is to change the default value of 0.75 to, say, 2.5 or 3.0. Of course, this means that the firing of points during startup may take 3 or 4 times longer. A better way to do it is to change the Railmaster firing order on startup, but I believe this may only be possible if you have the RM ProPack installed. With your setup, assuming your points addresses are 1 thru 20, then the following startup order might help ... Keeping the INI file value at 0.75, this would mean the complete sequence of points firing would take 19 x 0.75 = 14.25 seconds. The time between firings of ports on the same R8247 is 5 x 0.75 = 3.75 seconds, ample time for the CDU to recharge between each firing. Hope this helps with part 1 of your question. I will leave part 2 to someone else as I use a Power Booster between my eLink and the track so that when a short occurs, the Power Booster trips, but the eLink stays on. Ray

The Railmaster guide is wrong about which physical point motor attached to the double slip equates to which point icon on the layout diagram. It is also wrong to use the "Other points/signals" field for either address. Here are images extracted from the guide, on which I have changed the addresses to yours (19 & 20), and to which I have added the A, B, C and D labels used in the top picture, to the bottom picture of the layout diagram.... Now, imagine a train approaching from the left on either track A or B. The set of point blades reached first, referred to as Point Control 19 on the first picture, is a pair of "facing" points whose direction determines which of exits C or D is selected. On the track layout, the rightmost of the two points makes this selection, therefore this rightmost icon must control the leftmost physical point motor using address 19. The same logic applies, of course, the other way around, to trains approaching from the right. Ray

Windows uses Ctrl+A to "select all". It's a pity RM doesn't allow that for layout items. This would pick up even those which have drifted "off-screen". Ray

Chris, wasn't there an overseas user a few years ago whose service provider was blocking the link to HRMS. Might have been someone from Australia- or am I getting mixed up with something else? Ray

You should be able to load the "previous" program into the Program Editor, then before making any changes, change the name of the program in the dropdown box at the top to the new name, then click the green tick to save it as the new name. Then carry out the changes you want to this new version. Ray

For the last couple of hours I have been trying to reproduce your symptoms, firstly with v1.74.0 then with v1.74.1, but without success. May I ask whether you're using latching functions (those with on/off in their descriptions, or spot functions or a mixture of both? Ray

Good luck with that one!!!

The only other thing I can see that may be wrong with the TT signal setting is that you didn't select a signal type from the drop down list. Possibly selecting a 2-aspect home signal may have worked. Ray

Hi, Have you tried the programs "Barrier up" and "Barrier down" individually from the main screen drop down list? If they work ok from there, are you absolutely sure that each icon has the correct program assigned to it ? Ray

Downloaded and installed ok and tried "Expand plan=1" in the INI file. It seems to work ok as described in the guide. Of course, when the screen is enlarged, the usual buttons at the top are absent, so to close down Railmaster, the quickest way is to use the Windows 'X' button at the top right of the screen. Ray