Railworks.exe has stopped working

[NSrailfan6130]

It was the PONtrack.bin's deleted them and now it'sworking

[OlPaint]

Searching for and deleting the dreaded PONTrack.bin has saved my Railworks install, after loading new 3rd Party routes, any number of times.

I just installed "CSX Mainline" route from OVSRails web site and Railworks immediately refused to run. I have in the past, in desparation, uninstalled/reinstalled Railworks to recover. What a Night Mare!!! But this time, I remembered the advice to check for and delete PONTrack.bin. And Low and Behold...I am running again. I also Cleared the Cache for good measure. I remember Toripony's COARW v5.0 beta shut down my Railworks when I installed it, for the very same reason. And I recovered the very same way as well.

By the way, What issues does the presence of PONTrack.bin cause and why does Railworks choke on that file? Inquiring minds want to know.

OlPaint

[arizonachris]

The track rule itself is from the Port Ogden route, and somehow seems to end up in a lot of third party stuff. Why it causes the crash or failure to load routes? Dunno. No one's really figured it out that I have read. But I suppose, if there is more than one track rule, could that cause the problem? Like the route using one specific track rule, and this PONtrack also being present?

[Chacal]

The problem is the file is broken. It has 0 bytes.
From what I've seen, RW recovers gracefully when files are missing, it traps the error, notes it in the log but keeps going, and presents the user with an error message if needed, such as when rolling stock is missing from a scenario.

Not so much with broken files. It seems the programmers did not implement a sanity check on xml files before trying to use them, and did not trap this error, and in this particular case it crashes the sim.

What I have done to prevent this is simple: I already have a batch file for deleting the local blueprint cache, which I run frequently, especially when I install or update mods and add-ons. I added a command in the batch file for deleting PONTrack.bin.