Railworks America

Well this is a new one for me.... Since the recent game update, train simulator has been pretty unstable. For the past couple days, if I launch the 64 bit version of the game from the Steam launcher, the game never loads beyond the initial loading screen and then my entire computer freezes. I can load the 32 bit version of the game if I select the Train Simulator desktop icon, but I seem to have a 50% success rate launching the 32 bit version of the game from the Steam launcher. Otherwise, the game freezes at the initial loading screen and then my computer locks up until I do a hard restart.

So earlier this morning I tried to figure out what was going on and tried to launch the 32 bit version from the Steam launcher. The game froze on the loading screen, and my taskbar froze as well, forcing me to do a standard hard restart. I restarted my PC, only to find to my horror that train simulator is now listed as "Uninstalled" in my Steam library. All my DLC is now listed as "Uninstalled" as well. Any attempts to launch it result in the game trying to start an initial install process.

WTF!!

Exiting Steam and reloading didn't fix the issue. If I try to start the game from the desktop icon, I get an initial dialogue box asking how I want to go about installing Train Simulator.

I don't see any path forward other than redownloading this entire game and reinstalling all my mods. Luckily I backed up my game folder not too long ago, so I'm not losing much work. But man, is this incredibly, incredibly, incredibly frustrating.

Does anyone have any insight?

First whenever I have a problem the first thing I do is run the verify. All of the issues involving the game not starting usually involve missing files. In this case that train may have already left the station. Have you looked at the actual folder where TS is supposed to be to see what’s there. It may be there and just won’t start.

A couple of articles from Steam on this issue. https://support.steampowered.com/kb_art ... IP-2998&l=

https://support.steampowered.com/kb_art ... -SFLZ-9289

Thank you for the replies. I had to grit my teeth and go through the multi-hour reinstall process. After about 6 hours of downloading, I'm back up and running.

Is TS installed on your system drive or a separate drive. If the latter Steam may have only lost the directory.

Train Sim is in the default install directory on my PC. Back in July, I did make a backup of the entire Rail Simulator folder onto an external hard drive, which I keep plugged into my PC. Perhaps my system somehow got confused the other day and couldn't tell which was the 'real' installation? That's my only explanation, but I don't see how it would have taken over 2 months for this to have become a problem.

mjlevy1118 wrote:Train Sim is in the default install directory on my PC. Back in July, I did make a backup of the entire Rail Simulator folder onto an external hard drive, which I keep plugged into my PC. Perhaps my system somehow got confused the other day and couldn't tell which was the 'real' installation? That's my only explanation, but I don't see how it would have taken over 2 months for this to have become a problem.

If you had a backup on a external HD why when you had the problem didn't you just copy and paste that one into your proper installation instead of spending hours D/L a fresh copy?

mjlevy1118 wrote:Well this is a new one for me.... Since the recent game update, train simulator has been pretty unstable. For the past couple days, if I launch the 64 bit version of the game from the Steam launcher, the game never loads beyond the initial loading screen and then my entire computer freezes. I can load the 32 bit version of the game if I select the Train Simulator desktop icon, but I seem to have a 50% success rate launching the 32 bit version of the game from the Steam launcher. Otherwise, the game freezes at the initial loading screen and then my computer locks up until I do a hard restart.

So earlier this morning I tried to figure out what was going on and tried to launch the 32 bit version from the Steam launcher. The game froze on the loading screen, and my taskbar froze as well, forcing me to do a standard hard restart. I restarted my PC, only to find to my horror that train simulator is now listed as "Uninstalled" in my Steam library. All my DLC is now listed as "Uninstalled" as well. Any attempts to launch it result in the game trying to start an initial install process.

WTF!!

Exiting Steam and reloading didn't fix the issue. If I try to start the game from the desktop icon, I get an initial dialogue box asking how I want to go about installing Train Simulator.

I don't see any path forward other than redownloading this entire game and reinstalling all my mods. Luckily I backed up my game folder not too long ago, so I'm not losing much work. But man, is this incredibly, incredibly, incredibly frustrating.

Does anyone have any insight?

Did you check your hard drive to see if TS wasn't still there? I had a similar experience a few years ago through my own fault TS was on my system but Steam couldn't see it. I could still play TS though. To get Steam to recognise TS again I just gradually over a couple of months ticked all the boxes in the Library items window to download everything again.

buzz456 wrote:If you had a backup on a external HD why when you had the problem didn't you just copy and paste that one into your proper installation instead of spending hours D/L a fresh copy?

The problem was that Steam itself randomly stopped recognizing my installation, despite having a full and complete TS install directory. And even if I had restored from my backup, it still would have taken hours to copy over.

So TS did not uninstall itself after all. Steam just couldn't find it right?

buzz456 wrote:So TS did not uninstall itself after all. Steam just couldn't find it right?

Correct. Unfortunately I had already created this thread asking for help before I figured out that Steam was the true culprit. Admins, feel free to delete, unless leaving this thread might help others in similar situations.

I think this is informative and hopefully helpful to others faced with similar problems although any input anybody might have of how to repair this after it's identified without having to uninstall huge amounts of stuff would be appreciated.

This isn't just a TS problem but a Steam problem as other games do the same. See my Steam 2998 link above.