Route Building Do-s and Don't-s

My personal selection of Do-s and Don't-s in route building, all documented elsewhere, just to pass on recent experiences.

Do not create scenarios before track-laying is closed.
Who can resist to run a train on his nearly finished route? And who can resist some fine tuning later, tearing out something here and adding something there? Only problem: If you used something in a scenario, you should not tear it out or RW will issue the maximum penalty, "something bad happened, you will so see your route again".

If this happens -- or better, before -- move all scenarios to a safe place or better don't create them.

Clearly, there are compromises, just create free-roam ones with a starting place that will not change in the life of the route.

Do not believe what you see after deleting track
In particular when you delete pieces of track that formed or might form a junction, RW sometimes, but not all times deletes one more than you selected. Do not place a new piece to close the gap. Exit and reload the route and the missing piece will be back.

Do not expect signals or AI to work after you modified either anything scenario-related, or any signal. Just reload, it is the lesser of two wastes of time.

Do not remove parts of double or single slips.
I remembered that as a valid technology, to create a slip and then remove the crossing pieces, to obtain a regularly shaped curve. Don't do it. RW gets angry about the missing pieces of the slip and you sit debugging Tracks.xml.

Do make backups.
The most critical file in my view is Tracks.bin. Since the above mentioned crisis, I do a simple Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V in the Networks folder of the route I edit, whenever I cycle to "play again" and back, which is what you need to do if you want to know if your route still loads.

Pressing the play button in the world editor does not to the checks that are done on loading. I.e., you can "test" your route, then edit some more, etc., and the next day you find out that a lot of work is lost.

If you click "play again" on the main menu, everything is initialised as if you would have started the game, if you can load your route now, you will be able to do so tomorrow.