Is This The Death Of RailMaster?

[Finn1707822223]

Well with the release of the new 2023 range today, a new control system has been launched.

The "HMDCCC" or "HM7000" control system sounds like it will finally put to death any support for the RailMaster system, not that any support is being given for RailMaster for the last few years.

I personally have 3 tickets in with them about major bugs, with the only reply's being "It will be fixed in the next release".

Is it time for one of two things to happen:

1. Hornby and their subcontractor to make the code for RailMaster open source, this would allow individuals to modify it and fix issues.
2. The subcontractor that developed RailMaster starts a yearly subscription that would guarantee bugs being fixed and regular updates for things like future windows updates.

What are your thoughts?

[96RAF]

I have already bought the basic and Pro licences and any move towards a subscription service would see me bin it completely.

The new HM7K App system has a long way to go before it gets to RM levels. At present it is a basic loco and accessory control system. The trackbuilder aid is not interactive yet, but is likely to be made so in time.

The new app has no capability for programs or schedules, etc.

Its main advantage is reading and writing to CVs on the fly on the main.

[LuLuJo]

As I see it the new system is only of use to me for programming the new chips. I have a large layout with 100+ locos and more than 120 in points and signals.

I do find railmaster very frustrating to set up but once done it works on a layout of that level with a big screen. A handheld device added to it would be nice to have but is useless on its own to control anything much beyond a train set.

I do think that railmasters days are numbered so I expect that i will have to start looking at other alternatives.

[rpjallan]

Like @96RAF & @LuLuJo says, the new system has a long, long way to go before it has anywhere near the functionality of Railmaster. I think we'll just have to wait & see what happens over the next few years.

[Finn1707822223]

I think the point i was trying for (with a rather overdramatic title laughing) is that a lot of us RailMaster users have tickets in about faults we have found with the software, but all we get back from the RailMaster support is "We will address that fault with the next release/update of RailMaster".

I have had one of the fault tickets in since June 2021 about scale speed, they have acknowledged that there is a fault but and given the answer about sorting it with an update, but as yet still no fix.

It would be good if RM Support could at least give us a date (or year or century) of when we could expect the next update.

This does rather suggests to me that RailMaster denouement and maintenance has been abandoned and we are stuck with all of these faults and bugs.

I am wondering if it would be a good idea to start a new thread that is pinned to the top of the forum, where people can post bugs that have been reported to RailMaster and have been assigned a ticket number?

[96RAF]

A bug list sounds like a good idea. You generate it and we can pin it as a sticky.

[Finn1707822223]

Will get onto it thumbsup

[RDS]

I certainly hope this is not the Death of RailMaster, the only thing that RM is missing for me is Loco Detection.

[96RAF]

I certainly hope this is not the Death of RailMaster, the only thing that RM is missing for me is Loco Detection.

 

 

Use TGG instead, much better and the LD is cheap.

[37lover]

96RAF,

What is TGG please? I do not get any relevant results searching the Internet for TGG!

[96RAF]

I hope Ray doesn't mind the blatant plug but. . .

TGG is a model railway operating software package written by forum member Stingray as a replacement for RM. He got fed up waiting for LD to appear and various bugs to be ironed out so he wrote his own for personal use and very good it is to.

Here is a taste of it...

[37lover]

96RAF,

Thanks.

I exchanged messages with Stingray many, many months ago [well, probably a couple of years!] about his system but other things have kept me busy plus my ill placed belief that Hornby would get round to releasing their LD software. Or they might acknowledge defeat.

I firmly believe my layout, and enjoyment, would benefit tremendously with LD. My interest is rekindled!

Regards

Martin

[rpjallan]

I certainly hope this is not the Death of RailMaster, the only thing that RM is missing for me is Loco Detection.

 

 

I don't think this will be the death of Railmaster but I can see development slowing down even more now. I just can't see how this new system could do everything that Railmaster does right now, such as Programs & Route Setting, which I use quite a lot. And good luck with loco detection. I think that truely is dead in the water now! Who knows what Hornby's plans are though?

@96RAF, I seem to remember talk of Stingray's system some time ago. Is he open to letting forum members try it out?

 

 

[Finn1707822223]

Just a thought about the new system.

It runs on Bluetooth and this will have a couple of things to consider:

1, Bluetooth has a finite range, so large layouts may need some sort of Bluetooth repeater to increase range.

2, If you have a layout that has tunnels, depending on what they are made out of the Bluetooth signal may be lost as it cannot get through the scenery and tunnel walls.

I am not trying to trash the new system, but as a controls engineer I believe there is still a massive amount of things that could be done with Railmaster if the bugs are fixed and some fresh ideas and perspectives are fired at it.

[96RAF]

@finn

1. The range has been tested out to 45m and can be extended by Mesh connectivity using locos as mobile nodes and other BLE devices (TBD, but say HM6000/6010) as static nodes. Range is in theory infinite. I was told BT was developed for factory control which indicates great range to me.
2. The stay alive Power Bank will help keep the loco going and the Mesh connectivity will auto-reconnect any lost souls. I have a tunnel on my layout and all seems well. The iPad is on a bench at a level below the layout so the signal has to cope with all my framework, as well as general electronic racket from Power-Line network adapters, PC, monitor, electric fan heater, etc. No problems noticed so far.
3. Agree RM has great potential which will be increased when LD is released. They promised by Xmas then soon, then ...

[Fishmanoz]

Soon Rob? Sorry, but notice the list of LD Commands sticky was last posted to 7 years ago! Soon?

[Finn1707822223]

On the end of the bug report that i have posted was the reply's from RailMaster, the last one is this when i pressed them for a date.

Dear *****

Due to the amount of work involved in what we are doing, we dare not publish a date, or even an estimated one. Let's just say that it will be this year.

We may issue an intermediate maintenance udpate to deal primarily with new locos, accessory decoders and loco decoders.

Regards

RailMaster Support

so one can hope that it could be Xmas 2023, but they cannot spell update correctly so who knows joy

[Fishmanoz]

Glass houses Finn, but you can edit yours.

[Goathland]

I have received an email from HRMS 16/1/23 having logged a bug with them and their reply saying "We will set up a test here to try and replicate the issue, then fix it for the next program update." So another confirmation they are still talking about an update.

[Deepfat]

I gave up and moved to iTrain because of loconet detection. It is a lot of work to setup, but is actively developed and it just works. However loconet decoders are needed and I gues many on here will simply be happy to know something is on a section of track where loconet returns the ID of the loco.

I'd still love to see innovation in Railmaster but there is a vast backlog that needs fixing :

• reliability and security to run on windows 11 and support for ios osx and android.
• a licensing model to support multiple devices including mobile
• a better comms setup rather than legacy serial port emulation to improve data transfer and reliability.
• a better data layer to support the inventory of stock we have

and that's without hornby's own innovation into bluetooth enabled decoders

[BagEndJct]

Can I ask if there is sufficient Railmaster support to deal with the problems I always have registering the RM software on a new laptop? I can never get this to work via the Internet here in Spain.

It's sad for me to report that my layout is stil out of action since the roof of my "Trainshed" was ripped off by wind last March and I'm still waiting for a new roof to be fitted. Next month, I hope. It's going to be a lot of work to get it all set up again. Everything was thrown into boxes to protect from the heavy rain that followed the mini-tornado.

[rpjallan]

I do think that railmasters days are numbered so I expect that i will have to start looking at other alternatives.

 

 

Unfortunately, I have it on good authority that indeed This Is The Death Of RailMaster! There will be no more development, bug fixes or updates.

So I think it is time to start looking at other alternatives. I downloaded JMRI a while ago but I still haven't tried it yet.

I would like to try TGG but am unsure how to access it (if that is even possible). 96RAF says above to "use TGG instead" but is there any way to access it? Has Stingray made this available to other forum members? Or indeed anyone?

So, RailMaster has gone the way of Hornby Live Steam. Having said all this though, what Hornby's plans are for the future is anyones guess...

[96RAF]

HM7000 system has a long way to go before it gets to the basic RM capability never mind with the elusive loco detection. The app has a track-builder of sorts but no interactive operability from that screen. There is no provision for generating or running programs or support for other RM assets such as various makes and types of acc decoder, etc.

TGG - at present it has 7/8 folk running it with cheap and cheerful but very effective loco detection. Ray has just compiled the comprehensive user manual and is considering if and how to allow access to a wider audience. He has said this on another post somewhere on here. He may wish to open a new topic for TGG to better discuss the capability and possible future distribution. I will embarrass him now and say it is an excellent and extremely versatile app.

[Yelrow]

Finn, disagree about lack of RM support. Tiny team have been nothing but supportive and helpful, since its inception. Properly approached, they have always been helpful, even working over xmas. Perhaps one needs to have been a forum member longer, to appreciate, their value.

[RDS]

Finn, disagree about lack of RM support. Tiny team have been nothing but supportive and helpful, since its inception. Properly approached, they have always been helpful, even working over xmas. Perhaps one needs to have been a forum member longer, to appreciate, their value.

 

 

I completely agree with this. I personally have had fantastic support over the years from RailMaster Support, the last time only a few weeks ago.