TSRE5 NOOB Help

[oper190]

OK, got some track laid,

From your second photo of the track, all those vertical blue poles indicated the track node points, the spaces between them, where there is no yellow Track Data line shown are "missing" pieces that are not in the TDB. Need to replant those pieces.

Edit - Also I see TDB lines where there are no track pieces, so something got screwed up with the TDB, compared to the track pieces placed.

[SimonME30]

Yeah, they are screwed up alright. I've been hacking away at TrackViewer to try and get it to fix up the crappy tracklaying. It's nearly sent me blind, so I think I'm going to have another clean go, and just try and get TSRE5 to snap the track together...

Gotta say, I know what its doing is complicated, but its hard work trying to get it right.

Any tips on how to repair the TDB - TSRE5 doesn't seem to have the ability to do that with the current releases. Are there any prior releases that had that ability?

[dlfrenchmd]

Just a thought. Are you looking to lay track along a known rail route, or just inventing an original? There is a really cool map function in TSRE I didn't learn about until my second route.
Dan

[SimonME30]

Hi Dan, It's a real place in Yorkshire, UK. I probably did things the hard way, but I traced the centrelines over some 'plans' that were available online, which match up with what I did on the layout 30 years ago. I then made them into tiles that would be the right size and imported the 5x squares as terrain/textures. Then laid the track over them like they were a map.

It took me a while, but I think I worked it out in the end. I have my layout modelled in TSRE5, and can use OpenRails. This should give me the physics and sounds.

Next up is learning about consist spawning/de-spawning locations (which will be my traverser/fiddle yard), and the timetable.

1 big question - the freight yard is on a certain level, while the station approach declines alongside it at 1:50. For my purposes, do I need to bring the terrain up to the track, or is that just a visual thing? I did use the f key to mostly match the 3 tracks which are rising at 1:50, but once they start to diverge, I didn't know how to build a retaining wall (which is there in real life.

My big lessons were;

1. That the mouse and the right mouse button are how you move around, along with the arrow keys. The "." button will change whether the up and down arrow move you closer/further away, or transit across the terrain at 90 degrees to what the left/right arrows are doing;
2. You need textures to see the ground properly (the tiles I made were saved in the terrtex folder);
3. You need the xtracks downloaded (Shapes folder) and a matching tsection.dat to be able to see the track that you are laying;
4. I needed to approach the track laying sequentially, and not try to drop the double slip/diamond crossing/points where they needed to be, and then backfill with the straight and curved track in between. Also that getting rid of the yellow 'path' seemed to be as easy as selecting the relevant sector and pressing z, which meant I had less hidden artifacts.
5. Also do any transformations to track (rotation y value to get curves, gradients) before laying the next segment of track.

I take my hat off to you guys that have developed routes - All I think I need is 500m of track to represent my layout. I've not added any scenery or anything at all.

Anyway, here's where I got up to, hopefully it will work!

Thanks for your help and assistance, and patience as a Noobie ranted on about the interface...

Screenshot 2026-02-15 202705.png Screenshot 2026-02-15 202145.png

[eric]

Any tips on how to repair the TDB - TSRE5 doesn't seem to have the ability to do that with the current releases.

Well, it was made available in v8.005 which is on this site. Requires a few attributes in the Settings.txt file in order to work, so that you don't accidentally do this to an existing route by mistake.

Unsafemode = true
TDBRebuild = true

[SimonME30]

Thanks Eric. I think the TDB is OK now - I made a copy of my route and deleted 38.Pat which couldn't be repaired, and then the error went away, and it all looked OK.

I'm now trying to review paths in TrackFinder, and I'm seeing that I have a gap in one of the paths - I've tried inserting short pieces of track, but it just doesn't want to join the nodes together to form a continuous path. Any hot tips on how I get node 30 and 38 to join together? To my eye, this looks ugly with levels etc, and the diverging track through this junction seems to be missing a track panel, but when I had the track panel in there, then there was an overlap between 30 and 38... image.png

[pwillard]

I think one thing I always felt was missing from TSRE was an LED-like panel that showed the current state of "things that can be toggled," because accidentally pressing a key or forgetting I had pressed one was really messing with me.

[eric]

I added that in v8... its the status window. Floats off the main window so the editor can take up a single monitor with the navi & status windows on a second. If I missed a toggle, let me know as there are an extra slot or two left.

Sent from my SM-S911U using Tapatalk

[pwillard]

Cool, I haven't used that version yet.

[SimonME30]

Thanks for the comments folks. I've been able to join those two nodes - turns out the issue was that the join was over a tile border (or something), I tried to close the gap a bit further away, and hey presto.

Next issue that I am yet to solve - where do I find the platform and siding markers - in another project (Huddersfield and environs 1930's), I can see the platform markers on the track, and can click on them, see them as objects. But for the life of me I can't work out how to insert them into my track - they don't seem to be shapes, I can't see them in eith the Global or Shapes directories, nor in tsection.dat.

Any hot tips gratefully accepted.

[Darkhorse427]

they need to be defined in the .ref file for the route. here is what the entries for them look like on the route I am currently working on.

Platform (
Class ( "<Sidings & Platforms>" )
Description ( Platform )
StoreMatrix ( )
)
Siding (
Class ( "<Sidings & Platforms>" )
Description ( Siding )
StoreMatrix ( )
)

then you can access them and place them from here image.png

[SimonME30]

Excellent, thankyou. I found ref files in some of my other routes, eg "C:\OpenRails - Full Library\Routes\LYR-Heartland-1920\LYR-Heartland-1920.ref"

[RCSD505]

If I can add a couple questions of my own onto this thread as I am also a TSRE noob..

I have been messing with a couple of my older routes in TSRE just to add roadbed textures along the tracks. I know how to add the textures along the track, but I am noticing on one route it perfectly follows the track or road but on another route it will add the textures in a line moving away from the track and not along the track itself.

I also seem to have an issue where everything is dark, like the sun is behind a cloud. Makes it really hard to work accurately.