Back in August of 2020 I planned a mid 1950s route for the Dominion Atlantic Railway. In 1956 they were still using steam on passenger and fright, had just acquired wo MLW S-2s to use on the gypsum trains, and two new RDCs that would supplement the steam trains until replacing them totally in the next year. I thought it would be an interesting combination.
I took a copy of the DARv3 and started removing the southern 120 miles of track, scenery and tiles, trimming it back to be pretty much the original DAV route but with more modern scenery and structures. When I was finished I ran the remains through a TDB rebuild in MSTS Route Editor, I checked for errors in TSRE and ran the route through Route-Riter. All three gave it a clean bill of health so the work to backdate the route 20 year began.
The goal was to add the Kingsboro and Weston Branches out of Kentville. These served the rural communities on the north side of the Cornwallis River. Heavy traffic in late summer and fall during the fruit and vegetable harvest season but little more during the rest of the year. Both branches closed in 1960. The real major addition was going to be completing the Truro Sub between Windsor and Truro, some 55 miles. Truro was the connection to the Canadian National and over half the cars interchanged to the DAR.
Close to two years later I was three miles from Truro and the completion of the route when bad things started happening. I regularly checked the route for errors, found and fixed them but TSRE started showing errors and locations that didn't make any sense. Locations out in the woods no where near any tracks or roads sort of thing. When I was able to go to the location of an error and find track that I would replace, the number of errors would just increase. The problems got to the point I could no longer open the route in MSTS RE and when I hit 175 errors in TSRE and in September of 2024 I gave up after a month of trying to figure out what was going on with the route. I suspected that it might be something left over from me removing everything south of Coldbrook.
About a month ago I woke up in the middle of the night and for some reason thought I should try a copy of what remained of the route and just delete all the data bases and see what would happen. I've been around for a while and never heard of anyone doing that to a route they were having trouble with. That morning I opened a couple and deleted the four files plus their back-ups. When I opened the route everything was still there other then nothing was written to the none existent data bases. When I moved to a tile that had any interactives left in the World files, I was told to delete them which I did. By selecting each piece of track they were written to the TDB, roads were written to the RDB. Dynamic Track just needed to be selected to come to life. Out of the dozens of pieces only three needed to be replaced. Took a few days but I was able to run on the route again. I was able to do a TDB rebuild in MSTS Route Editor until I went into TSRE and selected to two turntables. I've added track and started adding scenery back and still no errors reported in TSRE.
So, nice to have the project beck on after writing it of a year ago.
Paul :-)
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