Most of the tiime, I can find those orphan track pieces and just delete them & save but I just discovered one that seems to have lost it's graphic. It does not seem to affect the operation of the editor etc. but I am concerned that this might cause a out of synch database, or be one?
I've tried that but this one fell through a hole and is located about 5000 meters underground. That method has worked a few times when the problem was at the surface.
The buried track is a known issue - if you turn off the terrain grid and start manipulating track, it will indeed drop to the bottom of the earth and then some.
If you can find those track objects in the world file, change the negative altitude value to something close to at ground level with your terrain and save it. When you open up TSRE, the shape object will render there and you can select and then delete the shape and its TDB reference.
What Jerry is showing... you may have a shape that has lost its shapefile. Auto fix won't know what to do with this and won't touch it.
I have had this happen with a couple of track shapes that show up with a tdb reference but the shape file was corrupted and would not render.
Change the filename to a trackshape you know is good, and do the steps above, and you should be able to do the same steps. The TDB doesn't care what the actual rendered shape is - you just need a way to remove that object UID from the TDB and remove the object declaration from the W file.
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I have discovered another "magic" thing that might help some. Sometimes when those track pieces are buried deep I can still just select them if I have a steady hand and delete them. In doing this, I noticed that when the cursor touches the item, it blossoms bigger and brighter, not a lot, but enough to notiice. If you click then, often you will select that buried item and then just delete it. Then I found that if you have any difficulty getting a track piece to attach to an existing piece, I observed that when you actually have hit the sweet point, this blossoming of the cursor appears and if you then click on it, most of the time you get a good attach. Then in the case where a track piece attaches but is above or below the end of the piece it is attaching to, I found that the quickest solution is to relay the existing piece in a different way. For example earlier today I could not get a correct attach to a 30M piece, so I relaid it as 2 15M pieces and the connection was okay. Don't know why, but if it works, I don't question it. Reached Grandview shortly before noon today and now am near mile 44 on the way down the north slope.
A few miles ahead we have mile 49. Then 2572 feet later is mile 49.5 and then 2572 feet later is mile 51. This is in the "loop district" which must have been a fantastic ride before the glacier they were avoiding retreated some and they relined the track. There was a descending tunnel shaped like a question mark, all inside, with the exit of the question mark several feet below the entrance and then this was followed by a complete 180 degree loop. The tunnel turned 230 degrees. This was tunnel #! which is a civil engineering landmark and you can find a marker for it on Google Earth. I would have liked to include it but the aerials do not show enough of the twisting & turning now.
Another thing I find useful is to frequently check your progress in Track Viewer. It is much easier to have a un-attached piece of track at some point and not notice it, so my habit is to stop every mile or so and load the route and a sort of fake path into Track Viewer. Reverse the direction and then reverse again with the fake starting at one end of the route - in the case of Alaska it is at the tip end of a pier iin Seward. This makes the path regenerate as far as it can go, hopefully to as far as edit has progress but if not, then go into TSRE and find the error which if you have not waited long will be relatively easy and quick to fix. Another thing I do is I have a 3Tb external drive and I have a Alaska directory and twenty sub-directories Alaska01-02-etc. At the close of each session I copy the route to the next open subdirectory and put the 3Tb drive back in the drawer. At 20, I burn a DVD and then start over. Such a drive is relatively inexpensive these days and Staples often has them on sale for $150 or less.
Another way to get an errant vector like that is to set the cursor to 'stick to everythng' mode, using a key combination that I always forget (Shift-Q?). That allows you to place the cursor on the vector itself, or one of the poles. It has to be pixel-perfect placement, but it can be done. Then you can just use the hack feature to get rid of said errant vector
I am currently building the main yards at Anchorage. I won't do the whole thing, but I will have enough tracks that complex activities can be created. In doing this, one must learn PATIENCE. The yard slopes upward from south to north (geographically southwest to northeast) in varying degrees and because of some odd curves in the yard, I have had to use more dynamic track than I like, however --- once I figured out how to do dynamic track (Goku calls it FlexTrack) I found it much easier to adjust and fit in curved pieces etc. than it was in MSTS. And also I found that most of the time when you get one of those locked up situation where you insert a piece and it locks slightly above or below the piece it is snapping too there are three things I found that usually fix this.
1. Select the piece you are snapping to and delete the vector, i.e. use the "Z" key. Before doing this I found that the vector is attaching to a spot just outside of the shape. Then use the "Z" key again and look to see if the blue number pole is now on the precise end of the shape. If so, go ahead and snap on the new piece and most of the time it works --- but if it doesn't.
2. Delete the piece you are snapping to and the piece you are adding. It seemed to me that doing this would remove any residual data in the database and usually it does, but if it doesn't---
3. More drastic measure. Perhaps the piece you were snapping to was a 40 meter piece. Replace it with two 20M pieces and cross fingers. I found that it usually works but if it doesn't------
avoid tearing out too much hair - at 84, almost 85, I don't have much left - and keep the cussing in check. Sleep on it and hope it is better tomorrow.
One other item to point out. Some pieces appear to have a 2nd or more node built in. For example, the 45M piece. There will be seen a yellow pole (node) at each end, but a 3rd one at the 40M point. When doing dynamic track where lets say you have a tangent-curve-tangent, there will be a yellow pole at each end, and another between each tangent section and curve section, i.e. 4 in all. None of these SHOULD produce a blue pole but I had one curve that did just that and so I deleted the piece after noteing the parameters and quickly set up another, which went in perfectly - GO FIGURE?
J. H. Sullivan, P.E. (retired from SR & CSX, and docent C&TSR)
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