MSTS - Helpful Facts and Links - Part 18 (Keeping up to date with your Tsection.dat by Mark Holding)

Keeping up to date with your Tsection.dat by Mark Holding

In Part 06 of the HFL series reference was made to the importance of the Tsection.dat file, and Mark has put together some important notes for it.

The Tsection.dat file is a small but important file located in your "Microsoft Games\Train Simulator\Global" folder, or wherever you have located the Train Simulator folder; it contains a database of all the track and road sections used in your MSTS routes.

It is important that you keep this file up to date as new routes will not work with old Tsection.dat files and trying to use an old Tsection.dat with a new route will cause MSTS to crash without warning. The reason for this is that older versions will not contain the newer track and road sections in its database, thus preventing MSTS from loading them.

When Tsection42 was released it was found that it caused problems in some UK routes, so an updated Tsection42UK version was released to address these problems. The latest version (at the time of writing) is Tsection Build00044 which incorporates the fixes made in Tsection42UK.

Always keep a back-up of your current Tsection.dat file when updating to the latest version in case of unforeseen problems as happened with Tsection42.

Some routes (especially commercial payware routes) come with their own Tsection.dat file that was current at the time the route was built, but may be well out of date by now. The installation of these routes often overwrite your current Tsection.dat file; so before installing any new route, always make a back-up of your current Tsection.dat file, and check it to make sure you still have the current Tsection.dat file after the new route is installed, if not, use your backed-up file to update it to the latest version again.

You can check the version number of your Tsection.dat file by opening it up with a text editor such as notepad; the version number should be near the top of the document.

It is worth noting that older routes will typically work with later Tsection.dat files.

WARNING - do not try to edit the Tsection.dat file unless you know exactly what you are doing!

When installing and/or amending all or any part of MSTS it is strongly recommended that you create a back-up copy, because even with the best will in the world mistakes can and will happen. There’s many a “simmer” who can testify to that.