Railworks America

Is there a way the change the track rules for a entire route using RW_Tools?

I'm trying to electrify the Fort kent to eagle lake route.

Read around here in the forum on the subject for details, but you can use RWTools to edit the route's tracks.bin file. If you open that file for editing in RWTools and parse down you'll see the entries for your current track rule and type of track from that rule. You can change those entries to what you want.

There entries for each section of track, so you'll have to do multiple changes, or the use the global find and change method.

DO A BACKUP OF YOUR ROUTE FIRST!

The tutorial for RWTools from Mike is very clear how to do this. I changed the Far North Route to ScaleRail and was successful on my first try.

If I may tack onto this thread for a partially related question ...

How critical is the advice I often see about not having more than one track rule on the route, and actually why would one consider doing that in the first place? I know the track rule affects data like allowed curvature and such, does it also affect appearance?

On my route I use three different track rules with no apparent problem. 1 for the interurban track, one for the 'yellow dirty' and 'bridge' track (GN Mainline trackrule), and one for short segments of 'rail only' track for ashpits (ATSF track rule).

Yes, the appearance of different types of track within a track rule can be and often are different from similar track types in other track rules. In the example I gave above, the 'rail only' track from the ATSF track rule is clearly a different rail size from that of the GNMainline track rule, but all are standard gauge.