Railworks America

Can an existing route; one that is NOT installed, be put into the .ap file format, then be installed into TS2014?

What do you mean by NOT installed?

Any asset folder or route folder can be packed into an .ap file. I have done that with my install, so all default files stay intact.
I pull the files I want to modify out of the .ap and put them in the original folder. When I mess up, I delete my copy and after clearing the cache, on the next start of Railworks, the default is called from the .ap file again. No harm done.

You can create an .ap file by using WinZip or WinRAR having create a zip file without compression, a "store" type of zip archive.
Once created, rename the .zip to .ap and you are done.

I download a route, but the routes assets are not in ap format. I want to put them into ap format with 7z to keep all those files together so they don't "mingle" with others in the asset folder and I can remove them later without affecting other asset folders.

Yes, you can use 7Zip to create .zip "store" types of archive.

Remember, you'll have to pack the contents of each asset folder under a provider's folder separately.
You can leave certain subfolders under that asset folder out of the .ap asset pack.

Look over a few of the more recent RSC/DTG routes and open a few asset packs to see how it is done.

Will do..... Thanks..... I'll follow up with the results for other readers