They are installed because i installed xtracks and newroads when i add other routes in such as bluemountains and CTN

Are they the latest versions?

yes because i reinstalled them when illawarra v3 bacame avalible for download

ok i got illawarra v3 working but another problem has come up. whenever i leave or enter sydney central it says shapes are missing even though i pressed the install me bat and the shapes are loading in the DOS box

MSTS is well known as a decidedly quirky piece of software - I doubt that any two MSTS users will have exactly the same MSTS installation - everyone will have different combinations of rolling stock installed and different combinations of routes installed. So, this fact alone makes troubleshooting extremely hard.

Over recent years, the detail levels of both routes and rolling stock have increased far beyond what MS ever envisaged when they wrote the base software - we are pushing MSTS to its very limits. Others have quite comprehensively detailed things necessary to get better performance out of MSTS, such as use MSTS-Bin, use Trainstore, etc.. But no matter what you do, at some point MSTS will simply stop working correctly because TOO MUCH stuff has been installed.

I test all my output thoroughly before release, both routes and stock, so when they become available, they should work without any problems. There are over a thousand users who have downloaded and run my routes without problem, and my rolling stock and scenery objects download count is now well over 25,000.

Why is it that when a new problem occurs, the user instantly thinks it's the route or rolling stock at fault, when it could be any one of dozens of things causing the problem???

I build all my stuff, both routes and rolling stock purely for my own use first and foremost - making them available to others is only a secondary reason.

So, the problem is with your MSTS installation, rather than with my route. As a starter for you to find the fault in your MSTS installation, here is a very good list of error correction hints and tips:

http://steam4me.railpage.org.au/trainsi ... index.html - scroll down till you see the Error Correction section. See also - http://steam4me.railpage.org.au/trainsi ... a_mem.html

You should be able to find your answer somewhere in those links.

Other than those, I can't do much to help you. As it is at the moment, I simply do not have time available to do exhaustive one-on-one problem solving for someone else's individual MSTS installation rather than with my route.

Regards, Brian