Raily 5 User Manual
en

Track annotations in detail

How to set and refresh an annotation is in Getting started 3. This page covers what goes beyond that.

All annotations at once

When the track layout has changed, every region running over the changed spot is stale. Bringing them up to date one at a time soon becomes tedious. Tools → Track annotations… opens the Refresh Track Annotations dialog, which shows them all at once.

The dialog for refreshing track annotations. The dialog for refreshing track annotations.

Each row is one region:

Column Meaning
Region Its number. The spanner beside it opens its parameters
Name The region name, if the kind knows one (see below) — editable here
Kind 2D highlight, Tunnel, Cut & fill, Viaduct …
Track The track the marker is anchored to
Mouths How many markers bound the region
Status See below
Status What it means
applied The region agrees with the track layout
stale Track has changed, the region has not been recomputed yet
inconsistent The region loops back into its own mouth — usually a ring with only one mouth
unresolved The region could not be computed
not on a track The marker is not anchored to any track

The tick on the left chooses what gets refreshed. Refresh recomputes the ticked regions from the current track layout and then reports how many were applied and how many were not, for one of the reasons above. Select in plan jumps to the annotations of the ticked rows.

It says «stale» after loading

A loaded plan shows what it last drew; regions are not recomputed when it opens. So "stale" here does not mean anything is wrong — a click on Refresh is enough.

Two dedicated layers

Raily puts annotations on two layers automatically, as soon as it needs them:

Layer Carries State
annotation-markers the markers themselves visible and unlocked — you're still meant to touch them
annotations the generated result: everything Refresh builds visible, locked, so a mark does not get moved by accident

That lets you show or hide the whole thing with one click in the layer tool — the markers alone, when they are in the way while you build, or the generated result, when you want to see only the bare track.

A different layer for the output

Open a marker's parameters and expand Layer of the output: Automatic means the automatic layer annotations; a chosen value applies only to this region.

Naming regions (advanced)

Two marks on the same stretch of track are not a contradiction — one may overlap the other or lie entirely inside it. So that Raily knows which marker belongs to which region, markers carry a name.

The rule behind it: a marker only bounds regions of its own name. A marker with a different name is not a boundary — it simply does not belong there. Without this mechanism every second mark would cut the first one in two.

So you need the name exactly when two regions of the same kind are meant to overlap — a mark for the station area, say, and a second, shorter one for the approach inside it.

Not every kind knows names

2D highlight, Block and Speed limit are told apart by name. Tunnel, Cut & fill and Viaduct, on the other hand, are bounded by their placement: there, two markers facing each other form a region, and two regions may not overlap — one bore cannot sit inside another.

A copy with no connection (advanced)

Generate standalone in an annotation's context menu rebuilds the result as an ordinary object and detaches it from the annotation: refreshing later no longer changes that copy.

It needs an annotation that sits on a track and resolves to a consistent region — otherwise there is nothing to generate.

See also