Changing the rules

3DTrains just announced that all versions of their ScaleRail have been updated to support superelevation. Since I use the SP/SF ScaleRail I am very much interested in this upgrade for the CC even if it means I would have to pull up and lay down several track areas with easements. While I went over the changes in my head about how I would apply this update to my custom track rules it occurred to me that this would make a nice tutorial.

To begin I will need to use RW_Tools to do the conversion from BIN to XML (you can use serz.exe if you wish) and Notepad++ (freeware source code editor) with the 'Compare' plugin to find the differences between the two track rules and make the modifications.

Notepad++ Plugin Manager. You want the Compare plugin

After installing the ScaleRail SP/SF update I will open the SR_SP.BIN found in the: '\Assets\3DTrains\ScaleRail\RailNetwork\TrackRules\' folder. Open the BIN, select all, copy, paste into a new panel in Notepad++ and then do the same with my custom track rule SR_SP_DMV.BIN which I have have in the same folder. Once I have both of the XML code side by side I can use the Compare plugin.

On the left is the update, to the right is my custom rule

We can ignore the changes between IDs, these are only needed by RailWorks to show the XML node is unique. What is left are two new sections 'DefaultSuperelevation' and 'DefaultRideQuality' (something I will definately be using in Niles Canyon). You can see that I lucked out. If there were more changes to the rules I would likely spend an hour or two working through each difference to see if I needed it or not. After copying the two new section of XML over to my customized track rule, I will do another compare just to make sure I didn't miss anything, and save it back to my SR_SP_DMV BIN file via RW_Tools.

Time to see my handy work on the CC. Lets select a curve (no easements yet), check the Superelevation box and see it in action!

Adding Superelevation

Its slight... but its working!

My thanks goes out to Hack of 3DTrains for updating ScaleRail (and not making a gazillion changes!). If you own any of the ScaleRail products (even the freeware version) then you can download the update from here.