Organizing routes by region in MSTS/Trainstore

I have got loads of routes installed in my MSTS installation and I found myself taking ages to find the route I wanted, so I found a way of organizing them by region.

It was quite easy to do but took a little while to go through them all, I simply opened the .trk file and added a prefix to the route name so that all UK routes were listed together, all EU routes were together etc. for instance "North West England. V2.0"  became "BR North West England. V2.0" all UK routes are prefixed with BR (BR NG for narrow gauge) so that in MSTS and Trainstore all my UK routes are listed together and I don't have to search through dozens of other routes to find what I'm looking for.

Prefixes I've used so far are as follows:-

AF = Africa
AU = Australia
BR = UK
BR IR = Ireland
EU = Europe
IR = Indian railways
JP = Japan
NZ = New Zealand
RU = Russia and former soviet bloc countries
US = USA and Canada
Z = Test routes, unfinished projects etc

The EU routes may be split into 3 sections at some point as I have a lot of French and German routes EG :-

DE = Germany
EU = Europe
FR = France

By using the above prefixes I can now find my routes very easily, for instance if I want to run a Japanese route, I just scroll down my extensive route list for JP prefixed routes.

I was going to do the same thing with my stock (a mammoth task) till my computer spat its dummy out and doesn't want to play anymore.

So if anyone else has a lot of routes installed and has trouble finding them, (especially lesser used ones you can't quite remember the name of) the above method may be of some help to you, or you could use that method to single out your favourite routes to appear at the top of the list,  it would be interesting to hear of your methods of doing the same sort of thing.

Thanks for posting this Mark, useful for TSSH HFL... If anyone has anymore Information would be good to hear. My Routes list is at a minimum at the moment, until more Activities become available for other routes.

I did use in my old laptop prefixes that related to route origin; e.g. UKTS Downloaded routes were prefixed UKTSDL, Making Tracks were prefixed MT, etc.
However I quite like your idea and will look at using it myself. Do you want to put this together as an HFL part, or if you prefer I will? I'll also add it to the HFL list.

Hi Alec

I will have a go at writing it and PM it to you when it's done, you can chop and change it, delete/add bits as you see fit.  

Interesting concept.

How does this affect activities though? If for instance I've called my Briscard route BR Bristol-Cardiff in the TRK file; then will any .apk files I've produced throw up a wobbly if somebody else tries to unpack them onto an un-renamed version of the route?

gswindale wrote:Interesting concept.

How does this affect activities though?  If for instance I've called my Briscard route BR Bristol-Cardiff in the TRK file; then will any .apk files I've produced throw up a wobbly if somebody else tries to unpack them onto an un-renamed version of the route?

If you've done that,why don't you try to install someone else's act for Bris Card and see what it does?

My understanding of what Mark is suggesting only changes the NAME line that is recognised by TrainStore and not the actual TRACK ID line. It's the TRACK ID that the "apk" files look for I believe and not the name, unless of course someone knows different.

As an aside it's worth noting that TrainStore uses the NAME line in an ENG file as the means of recognition and listing in the EXPLORE THE ROUTE pane, it also uses the NAME line in an ACTIVITY file as the means of recognition and listing in the RUN AN ACTIVITY pane.

These comments are in a preliminary HFL part for TrainStore that has been put to one side as I juggle my other tasks.

As Alec said, this only affects the name as displayed by MSTS and trainstore, and has no effect on activities, route updates, patches,  etc. RE & AE also work as normal, only the order in which the routes are displayed is changed (which is the desired effect), I have installed acts, run existing acts, created acts, updated and patched routes since I changed the name line in all my .TRK files, and not had one single problem due to the name line changes. (the route ID line must NOT be changed for this exercise though )

Thanks Guys - that makes perfect sense now.

I simply move the route out of the Route folder.
Thus Thames_Trent goes to MSTS/Route Store/British Routes/LMS/Thames_Trent
The Thames_Trent folder contains the route, the activity folder (including Consists) and a dedicated Trainset folder.

Unused routes are zipped up to save space and all routes are zipped up once a month and copied to an external hard drive as a backup.

Making a dedicated route Trainset and Consist folder used to be difficult but Route Riter does this if you create a mini route.

I don't use Train Store.