What went into each version.

DCC and wiring

• DCC turnouts have addresses. The DCC Point Decoder and the Cobalt iP Digital each answer to an accessory address from 1 to 2048. A new one is given the next free address when you place it, and two on the same address are flagged so you can spot the clash.
• Throw turnouts from a handset. Handsets have a LOCOS / TURNOUTS switch along the top. In turnout mode, key in an address and press CLOSE or THROW. Under Precise Control a decoder only hears the handset when its bus is live.
• A new DCC Stall Motor Decoder part, so a Tortoise can be driven by DCC as well as by a DPDT lever, with its own Learn more article.
• The metal frogs on Roco Line, Tillig and Atlas Custom-Line turnouts can now be fed. They are dead as sold, and take the set road’s polarity once a PM1, a frog switch or a decoder is wired to them.
• A new example layout, six TT:120 turnouts wired with levers, DCC decoders, and one motor on both.

Simulator

• A list of every loco and turnout with its address, in the right-hand pane. Change an address there, and hover a row to light that loco or turnout on the board (and the other way round).
• See where your train will go before you place it. Stock picked from the list shows as a faded preview under the pointer, ringed in red dots where it cannot go. A click puts it down centred on the pointer, and it couples only to a train on the track you are pointing at, at the nearer end.
• Shift and the mouse wheel turn what you are about to place: stock end for end, scenery in 45 degree steps. This works in Decoration too, where scenery shows the same faded preview.
• Any two train ends now couple, so a loco can back onto a rake that already has a loco on it, and two locos can meet nose to nose.
• Front and Rear now follow the end the train is actually leading with, so adding stock to the Front of a turned train puts it where you expect.
• The stock list is split into Steam, Diesel, Electric and Multiple Units, so the electrics no longer sit under Diesel.

Rolling stock

• The InterCity 125 HST replaces the Class 805. Layouts that used the 805 switch to the HST automatically, keeping each vehicle’s address, number, colour and direction. The Class 43 power car is also offered on its own.
• New British stock: LNER A4 Mallard, BR A4 Union of South Africa, LMS Princess Coronation, GWR Hall with a GWR coach, Class 02 and Class 03 shunters, a Hunslet Austerity 0-6-0ST in Longmoor Military Railway blue, the English Electric GT3 gas turbine, a Mk3 coach in InterCity livery, and 45t and 102t tank wagons.
• The Class 150 Sprinter replaces the generic DMU, and old layouts switch over automatically.
• New American stock: the Union Pacific Big Boy, articulated so it takes model curves, and the PRR GG1.
• New Continental stock: DB BR 111 and BR 152, DR V 100, the Henschel DHG 500 C shunter, and the Soviet IS 2-8-4 and S class 2-6-2. The V 60, the BR 232 and the ÖBB 1116 Taurus are retired, and old layouts swap them for the V 100, the BR 152 and an ÖBB 2016.
• Sharper new top-down artwork for many locos, and the Deltic’s height corrected.

Baseboards

• Framing. The Baseboard stage has a Framing mode. Draw timbers by their centre lines, set their thickness and depth, and place legs. Ends snap neatly to the face of the timber they butt against or to the board’s edge. Look from the top or the underside, the same way as the Wiring view.
• Frame a board in one go. Pick a spacing, see the frame laid out as a preview, adjust it, then add it with one click. Boards that are not plain rectangles get timbers run edge to edge across them.
• The framing shows faintly on the Boards side so you can plan your joins around it (there is a switch for it in the View menu), and board thickness is now set on the Boards side.
• The reference image is easier to work with. There is an Edit image button in the left menu, and an Edit / resize image button in the right pane once an image is placed. Set scale is a big button in both, and while you use it the cursor becomes a tape measure, with the steps and the length box shown right on the board beside your line.
• Labels on the board share one style and shrink sensibly when you zoom out.

Track

• HO track is out of preview: Roco, PIKO, Atlas and Märklin.
• Lionel FasTrack, Atlas O and Lenz Spur 0 are out of preview. MTH RealTrax stays in preview for now.
• Uncoupling ramps are the right size at every scale. The Uncoupler tool used to clip in OO’s 40mm ramp whatever you were modelling. It now lays one sized to the layout’s scale: 7mm in T gauge, 14mm in Z, 19mm in N 1:160, 35mm in HO and 70mm in O. OO stays at 40mm. Ramps already on a layout keep their length, and you can still change it in the right pane. The handles at each end of a ramp are sized to the track too, so on T gauge and Z they no longer cover the ramp, and they are drawn whole on top of it.
• T gauge buffer stops and uncoupling ramps now draw properly. They were too small for the 3mm track and drew wrongly.
• Flexible track: a click now fixes the rail down for good, and moving the pointer behind the free end no longer lays a U-turn. Ctrl+click on the arrow, or Re-lay whole in the Shape pane, lays the whole piece again from scratch.

General

• LiveRail for Linux, as a beta. A 64-bit AppImage for Linux such as Ubuntu 22.04 or newer, from the Fares page beside the Windows download.
• Every layout now opens fitted to the screen, whether you open a file, start a new one or pick a template.
• Levels are now stacked in order of their height, so a lower board can never be drawn over track that sits above it.

Flexible track

• Add parallel track beside flexi you have already laid. Select one piece or several, pick left or right and how many, and a faded preview shows where the new track will go, with a ruler between each pair. Choose the standard spacing for your track or type your own. Joined tracks that already sit side by side are treated as one set, and new track starts from the outer edge.
• Optimise re-cuts joined flexi into full lengths plus one shorter last piece, so you use fewer pieces for the same rail. It now handles a closed loop of flexi as well.
• Track that crosses or lies on other track, and track bent tighter than your minimum radius, is marked in red dots.
• Adding parallel track remembers the spacing you chose last, and the Shift-drag selection box now catches a piece only when all of it is inside the box.

Trains

• Easy Run no longer stops a train at a joint where two pieces meet end to end. Locos could stand still at that joint, and the reverse button drove the same way as forward. Both are fixed.

Track

• Peco Electrofrog three-ways (SL-E99, SL-E199) and live-frog slips (SL-E180, SL-E190, SL-U1180, SL-U1190) are now available, wired as the makers describe.
• 31 more pieces are ready to use: Peco Code 75 bullhead points, the SL-184 and SL-185, SL-104F and SL-106F, Hornby’s R636, Tillig curved points and double slips, Tomix curved points and double slips, MTH’s O-82 and O-42, and three buffers.
• Every make of turnout now says plainly how it routes power, using that maker’s own words, and the track connections show each make’s own joiner (fishplate, UniJoiner, rail joiner and so on).

Baseboards

• Hold Shift while drawing a board or island to lock each edge to 45 degree steps. Corners show the angle inside the board, and a join’s end snaps to the edge of the board when it is near. There is an Angles switch in the View menu.
• A Baseboard grid switch in the View menu draws the grid on the timber itself.
• Fixed a crash when opening the door inspector in the Room stage.

Fixes

• PIKO A-Gleis, Roco Line and Tillig bedded turnouts now keep every rail live whichever way they are set, with the frog the only dead part, as the makers' own instructions say. They used to behave like Peco Insulfrog points, which left a siding's rail dead and sent people wiring jumpers under the board that the track did not need.
• Tomix Fine Track points, Y points, three-ways and double slips now feed only the road they are set for, on both rails, as Tomix's fully selective points do. There is no switch to turn it off, because the real ones have none.
• Two new Learn more articles explain how these turnouts feed their rails.

New scales and track

• Z scale (1:220) with Rokuhan and Märklin Z track. Their turnouts route power the way the real ones do.
• American O (1:48) and Continental O (1:45), both on the 32mm track British O uses, with Lionel FasTrack, MTH RealTrax, Atlas O (three rail and two rail) and Lenz track.
• Every plain Peco Streamline turnout now leaves the road by the same amount, so two laid back to back meet properly.

Flexible track

• Shape a flexi by dragging nodes. The rail takes the smoothest bend through them, and a Smooth button tidies the curve between nodes.
• A flexi takes two clicks to lay: where it starts, then which way it faces, with an arrow and a degree read-out.
• Angle guides show the turn of each bend, with locks for 45 and 90 degrees and an optional compass lock.
• Right-click a bent flexi to flip it. A warning shows when a bend has reached its minimum radius.

Parallel track

• Lay one to five parallel flexi lanes at once, with a picture to choose how many.
• Each track range now has its own spacers at the top of its block, at the spacing that range’s track is built to. No range shows more than two, and a custom spacer stays on the main menu.
• Märklin C track has a spacer, which it was missing.
• Spacers join box and lasso selections and move with the track they hold.

Selecting and heights

• A Select all menu (all track, flexi, curves, turnouts, or all like the selected) and a Lasso tool.
• A Heights button puts a typed height box at every joint. Typing at the end of a selected run grades the run up to it.
• Holding Shift while rotating anything locks it to 45 degree steps in every view.

Track library

• Favourites and the Track Box are two small icons in the search box, and Favourites keeps your starred pieces.

Fixes

• Spacers on any layout except OO held OO’s spacing under another range’s name. An Atlas 3in spacer held 67mm. New spacers hold the figure they show.
• Three rail: a loop with one piece laid the other way round no longer stops the train.
• Deleting a turntable no longer leaves its deck wires behind in the file.

Kato Unitrack for N

• Kato is out of preview. Every piece has been checked against what Kato sell.
• Bridges and viaducts are in: viaduct straights and curves, double viaducts, and the plate girder, deck girder, truss and curved girder bridges. They are laid like any piece, sit on a grey deck, and the girders are drawn over the track and the trains on it. They have their own Bridges shelf.
• The crossovers (20-210, 20-230 and 20-231) now work: a tie bar and blades at every toe, routes you can throw, and power that follows the blades.
• The pit, ash pit and signal straights can be laid. The signal track brings its own three aspect signal, wired like any other signal, and the nine uncoupling tracks come with their ramp.
• Kato’s own incline is understood. The incline pier sets are no longer flagged as too steep, and locos are judged at the scale they are modelled in, so N trains stop being called too weak for a 4% climb they can manage.
• Straights that open out (the 20-050 and 20-058) stretch to length with an end handle or a Length field.

Tomix and Fleischmann

• Tomix Fine Track is in for the new 1:150 scale (below): 80 pieces including the three-ways, with the curved points and double slips still held back.
• Fleischmann piccolo gains the three-way (9157), the 15 degree crossings (9162 and 9163) and the double slips (9184 and 9185). The figures come from Fleischmann’s own instructions. Only the 30 degree crossing (9161) is still held. Fleischmann is still marked as a preview.
• Double slips now come in a left and a right hand.

A scale for Japan

• N at 1:150 is a new scale, under a Japanese flag in the New Layout dialog. It sizes scenery and track for Japanese N. It is offered every locomotive and wagon roster (British, Continental and American), drawn at 1:150. A Japanese roster will follow.

Wiring

• You can place a generic wiring box with ports of your own, in a choice of looks, with six stock boxes to start from. It is a drawing: wires to it are coloured and listed, but nothing passes between its ports, and every place it appears says so.
• Panel switches are now drawn in full on the Top side of the Wiring view, with their wires still run underneath, instead of showing a dashed marker.

Levels and heights

• Everything that is not on the level you are building on is drawn back, in the Planner, Wiring, Decoration and Baseboard views, so two ticked decks no longer look like one railway. A baseboard standing on top of another casts a small shadow.
• A node that hangs off its own board over a lower board shows a second, smaller line under its height, such as "100 mm above Layer 1".
• Track is drawn low to high, a bridge’s deck is drawn with the bridge, and a double piece shares one deck and one bed, so a line under a viaduct really is under it. Trains are drawn on the level of the track they stand on.

Reference image

• The reference image can now be shown in every stage from the View menu, except Wiring where it starts off. Its fade slider sits under the switch, labelled Transparency, and it is the same setting as the Fade on the Baseboard pane.

Planner

• Every shelf in the track palette runs along the figure you scan it for: by length, then radius, then sleeper type. Each row has a small circle in the colour of its sleepers, with the name of the sleepers on hover.
• Board joins are placed with a tool that puts itself away, and both ends, the length and the angle can be typed in. A join’s end lands on a corner of the board or another join when it is near one.
• Ctrl+A selects all the track and gauges in the drawing views.
• Ready-made Peco plans are in, with a picker by maker, and the scale is chosen when a plan loads.
• Full throttle is a scale speed. It was the same board speed at every scale, so N ran far too fast. OO is unchanged.
• N curves are drawn smooth when you zoom right in, with no angle notches in the rails. The line a train runs on is unchanged.
• Bridge pieces drawn from the Kato range show short sleeper blocks on each rail instead of full width ties. An uncoupling ramp’s length can be adjusted.

Scenery

• Fences, walls and hedges are a new block in the Decoration palette. Pick a style, click along where it goes, then right-click or press Enter to finish. Double-click adds a node and corners are dragged and rounded like a road’s. There are eleven styles in four groups: picket, post and rail, post and wire and close-boarded fences, iron railings, steel palisade and chain-link, dry-stone and brick walls, and a hedgerow and a clipped hedge, each in several colours.
• Every decoration object, platforms and buildings included, has an Over track or Under track choice of its own.
• A raised line goes over scenery it clears. A viaduct or any track lifted above a platform’s height passes over it instead of being hidden, and the height is worked out at your layout’s scale, so an N platform is thinner than an OO one.
• A bridge throws a shadow on the ground, the scenery and any lower track it crosses, in the same light as the buildings. It never falls on its own deck.

Menus and the window

• Menus can no longer run off the edge of the window. The View, Layers, Reference, app and colour menus measure themselves when they open and move back inside.
• The cursor read-out at the bottom no longer runs over the magnet and scale text.
• The last card of the introduction offers to start a new layout in one click.
• An announcement banner can show a message from the LiveRail site. It reads one small file, ignores anything odd in it, and Options, Announcements, switches it off.

Fixes and changes

• Right-click Copy no longer crashes, and the eraser cursor is right again.
• The Options interface size check no longer fails on the announcement switch (a fault in a check, not the app).

User guide

• There is now a beginner’s guide in the app. Open it from User guide in the app menu and it sits beside the board instead of over it, so you can read a step and do it with both in view. It starts with finding your way round and getting a first train running, then takes you through each stage in turn.

Wiring

• A new Show switch in the bar over the board lets you see All the wiring, only Control (the socket, the controller and the feeds to the rails), or only Accessories (point motors, switches, turntables and signals).
• The parts list no longer changes when you switch. Every wiring part is always there, and if you pick one that the view you are in would hide, LiveRail switches to All so you can see what you have placed.
• Detail, the Basic or Advanced choice, now slides in beside Show when you pick Control. Basic only says whether the track is live, so it belongs there, and the other two views always show the full diagram.
• Hold Ctrl for a moment and the Bus Wire tool comes out, so you can start a bus wire without reaching for the toolbar. Let go and it goes, although a bus you have already started carries on until you finish it. While the tool is out, Ctrl and scroll changes the wire gauge instead of zooming.
• Under Precise Control a point motor or turntable motor now does nothing unless it is wired to a supply. A turntable with no power falls back to its step buttons and tells you why, and a panel lever will not throw a point motor that has none. Easy Run does not read the wiring, so it behaves as before.
• A Hornby R070 turntable wired through an R046 lever switch is now seen as powered. Before this it reported that nothing was feeding it.

Kato Unitrack for N

• The Kato range for N has been checked piece by piece against what Kato sell, and the track that was missing has been added.
• Double track is in. Kato’s double-track straights, feeders, curves and widenings are laid as one piece with two roads, and each road is wired and powered on its own. The double crossovers are not in yet.
• Kato turnouts send power only to the road they are set for, as the real ones do, and the switch machine built into each one comes with the turnout, so there is nothing extra to buy or wire. Power routing can be switched off on a turnout if you would rather it did not.
• The Kato 20-283 turntable is in, with a roundhouse that fits it.

More track and turntables

• Fleischmann piccolo’s four curved turnouts (9168, 9169, 9174 and 9175) can now be laid.
• Peco’s NB-55 turntable for N and LK-1455 for HOm are in, each with a roundhouse that fits it. Both turn by hand or take Peco’s PL-55 motor, and roads coming off any turntable now take the board’s ballast, or the maker’s moulded bed, like other track.

Heights

• A height is now read against the baseboard under the track, and the panel says which board it is measuring from. Track cannot be read as sitting lower than its own roadbed, so a ramp that starts flat on the board no longer shows a gradient over a drop that is not there. On a layout with more than one level, a View option shows heights from the lowest level instead.

Interface size

• The interface size in Settings is now a - and a + button with the size between them, which you can also type in, and it runs from 80% to 200%. It used to be a row of buttons up to 300%, and the top of the row ran off the edge of the dialog. If you had 250% or 300% saved you are brought to 200%.

Fixes and changes

• Putting a large reference image under the board and then editing the outline could run LiveRail out of memory and leave it blank. That is fixed, along with a window that would not close afterwards.
• A building already on the board no longer has a list of other roofs in its inspector, because a different roof is a different building. Pick it from the palette instead.

Start screen

• Opening LiveRail from its shortcut now lands on a start screen with large buttons: New layout, Open layout, My Track Box and a link to the LiveRail channel on YouTube. It does not appear when you open a saved layout by double-clicking the file.
• If you were part-way through a layout when you last closed the app, a Carry on button picks it up where you left off.
• New layout asks for the gauge first, so a layout always starts on the track you mean to lay.
• Installs with a licence get a What’s new button that opens this page. The free version has Purchase licence in its place.

Making the app bigger

• Interface size buttons, a minus and a plus, sit in the app menu under View. Ctrl and plus, Ctrl and minus and Ctrl 0 do the same from the keyboard, and the same choice is in Options. The size is remembered.
• Every panel, menu and dialog scales with it, from 80% to 300%. When a window is too small for the size you pick, the page scrolls rather than cutting the menus off.
• The menu button and the View menu now have a visible outline, so they are easy to find.

My Track Box

• Brand and Gauge filters sit under the search box, so you can see only the track you own for the gauge you model without scrolling the whole catalogue. Each list only offers what the other leaves, so a pick never gives you an empty list.
• Opened from the start screen, the box lists every gauge, so you can count your track before you have started a layout.
• The “Only what I own” tick stays in reach in a narrow window.

Wiring

• A Peco Unifrog’s frog can now be wired. It is isolated, takes an optional feed and follows the set road, and the Wiring view draws it as its own small vee.

Numbered wagons

Lay a yard, put numbered wagons down in a jumble, and the job is the classic one: sort them into order with your loco, a few sidings and the uncoupling ramps. Everything you need to set that up for yourself is in this release.

• Give each wagon a number of up to six characters, set per wagon, so two wagons of the same type in one rake can be told apart at a glance.
• Give each wagon its own colour as well.

Scales

• O gauge, HO, N at 1:160, T gauge and HOm are all selectable with no preview label. A scale only sets the size of locomotives, wagons and scenery, so it is no longer called a preview.
• New Layout asks for the gauge first, then the scale on it. Picking a gauge opens a short list of the track makers and ranges available on it, one line per maker.
• What is still unfinished is some of the track made for those scales, and that is what is marked now: a small amber cog in the New Layout list, on the Track Planner brand plates and in the Track Box. Ranges in preview today are Tillig (on both 12mm scales), Atlas, Roco, PIKO and Märklin at HO, Kato and Fleischmann at N 1:160, and T gauge.
• Set track curves now lead with their radius number.

New track (preview)

• N at 1:160: Kato Unitrack and Fleischmann piccolo.
• HOm: Tillig H0m track, bedded and Elite, with a roster of narrow gauge locomotives and wagons.
• T gauge: 3mm track, and the canvas now zooms in far enough to work at that size.

Custom scale and custom track (preview)

• Make a scale of your own from a gauge and a ratio, with a recommended scale suggested.
• A Custom track wizard for straights, curves, turnouts, diamond crossings and three rail. Edit or delete what you make afterwards.
• Import and export track files, so a range someone else made can be brought in with its scale.
• Every distance in the wizard follows your chosen units, and you are asked before anything is removed.

Region

• Scenery, signals, road vehicles and rolling stock now follow a UK, EU or USA pick in the Decoration and Simulator views, so you can mix a British layout with one American depot.
• New Layout no longer asks for a region, and existing files open exactly as they did.

Layers

• A board on a higher layer now covers the levels beneath it.
• Heights carry across levels. Joining track on two layers writes the same rail height to both, and each end of the joint is labelled with its own figure.
• A train is drawn on the level it is standing on, not the one it started on.

Wiring

• The Bus Wire tool lays bus wires only. Feeders start from a terminal or rail end, or from a bus with Ctrl held.
• Feeders now go from a bus to a fishplate as well as from a fishplate to a bus.
• A wire shows where it will land. The node, bus or rail under the pointer swells slightly, both while a wire is in your hand and, with the Bus Wire tool out, before you start one (with Ctrl held, over a bus).
• Buses laid under the board show as a faint ghost from the top view.

LiveRail is a planning aid, not an electrical certificate.

Export

• The image export now draws scenery, bridges and tunnels.

Fixed

• A piece laid onto track on another level at a different height now shows the “Track heights don’t line up” warning, instead of silently reading as joined when the two ends were really 100mm apart.
• PIKO double slip (55224, 55424): the rails no longer flip to the wrong side at the module ends. The Roco geoLINE double slip 61164 had the same flip and is fixed too.
• PIKO wye (55226, 55426): sleepers no longer span both branches. They are shared up to the frog and then split.
• Mains, power district and reversing loop fixes, found by testing a layout for every track system.
• Heights can no longer be stored below their own board.

American HO (preview)

A layout of its own, with its own shelf, roster and scenery. None of it is British stock renamed.

• Over a hundred pieces of American track: Peco’s Code 83 Line, and Atlas in Code 83, Code 100 and True-Track, including the Atlas turntable. The Atlas geometry is measured from Atlas’s own planning software.
• Track reads in inches on an American layout, the way the trade sells it: a 9in straight, an 18in radius.
• Seventeen locomotives, cars and trains: the GP38-2, SD40-2, SW1500, ES44AC, the F7 in A and A-B, a USRA 0-6-0 and a USRA light Mikado, heavyweight and streamlined coaches, a boxcar, gondola, covered hopper, tank car, flat car and a cupola caboose.
• Nine American buildings, each dropped at its real size: a depot, an interlocking tower, a freight house, a water tank, a coaling tower, a textile mill, a grain elevator, a barn and silo, and a roundhouse made to fit the Atlas turntable.
• Nine native trees, from red oak and sugar maple to ponderosa pine and mesquite.
• Low-level and high-level platforms, each section one 85ft car long, with a safety-yellow edge on the high ones.

Continental HO (preview)

• Over two hundred pieces of Continental track: Roco Line and PIKO A-Gleis, each bare or in its moulded bed, Roco’s geoLINE, Peco Code 100, and Märklin C, the first three-rail track in the app, with the wiring to match.
• Every figure is checked against two or three published sources, and the curved points are laid the way Roco and PIKO build them, so a crossover lands on the maker’s own track centres.
• Twenty-seven locomotives, coaches, wagons and trains from Germany, Switzerland, Austria and France: the BR 218, 232 Ludmilla, V 60, BR 103, 143, 101, both Crocodiles, the BR 86 tank and the BR 01 Pacific, the Re 460, Re 4/4 II, Taurus, Hercules, BB 22200 and Vectron, Silberling, double-deck, EW IV, Corail and Eurofima coaches, and four UIC wagons.
• Eight Continental buildings: a town station, a signal tower, a round water tower, a loading ramp, a warehouse, a sawmill, a village church, and a farmhouse and barn.
• Thirteen trees, the biggest set in the app, from beech and silver birch to Lombardy poplar and horse chestnut.
• Platforms at the two standard heights, 550mm and 760mm, in 20m and 10m sections with islands.

A preview can be used for real, but its figures may still change before it is finished. The app asks you to confirm before creating one.

N and TT:120

• N gauge, with Peco Setrack and Streamline in Code 80 and Streamline in Code 55.
• TT:120, with Hornby’s range and Peco’s Setrack and Streamline.
• O gauge as a preview, with Peco’s O Setrack and Streamline. It is marked preview in the app while the last of its figures are checked.
• Every scale draws its own sleepers, timbers, rail and track bed from that range’s own figures, so a riser height is right for the track you are laying.

Rolling stock

• The whole British roster now runs in O as well, drawn at 1:43.5 from the same dimensions. The palette gives each one’s length before you pick it.
• A new engine: the L&SWR B4 dock tank, in OO, N, TT:120 and O.

Planner

• A reference image under the board. Drop in a published plan, a sketch or a photograph of the room, set its scale by drawing a line across something you know the length of, and build on top of it. It stays out of the printout and the exported picture.
• An In Testing shelf. Pieces that are known about but not yet fully checked are in the palette, greyed out, so you can see they have not been missed.
• Peco SL-E193 and SL-E194 diamonds, the SL-108F bullhead flexible track, and a corrected short Y.
• Track that comes with its ballast moulded on shows its grey bed in every view, at the width the maker made it.
• New Layout shows a sample of each gauge side by side, and the region you pick is fixed for that layout.

Wiring

• A section switchboard for DC block control: up to twelve sections, each with its own switch and a name you choose. A section switched off goes dead on the plan.
• A polarity reverser, the DC answer to a reversing loop, with its own lever.
• The controller’s direction switch now swaps the rails it feeds, so the colours in the Wiring view and the way a train drives always agree.
• Electrofrog diamonds have two frogs, each isolated and switched from outside, the way Peco wire them.
• A reverser’s output tags and wires show the polarity they are carrying right now.

LiveRail is a planning aid, not an electrical certificate.

Simulator

• A control board. The throttle, track power, section switches, reversing levers, point levers and turntables go on one panel you arrange yourself, and it is saved with the layout.

Planner

• Peco Streamline Code 75. The finer rail is drawn thinner and the track bed measured to suit it, so a riser height is right for the range you are laying.
• Turn a turntable by hand. Click the table and the deck turns one node clockwise, motor fitted or not.

Wiring

• A mains socket you place on the wall of the room. Every box with a transformer in it has a plug, and the plug has to reach a socket, so a board down the far wall is a problem you find before the timber is cut.
• The analogue controller is a complete traction supply, transformer included. The palette splits into Control and Accessories.
• Turntable wiring. Each set of rails round the pit is fed on its own: the R070 off its inlet line, the LK-55 off a split ring under the deck that swaps the bridge over as it turns.
• Deck feed terminals on the table itself, drawn on the underside where the wires come up.
• An auto-reverser swaps the whole section it feeds and watches every joint on it. Two joints out of phase at once is a fault, and the app says whether the cure is a part or a rewire.
• A crossed gap round the pit gets the same warning triangle a short does, drawn at the gap.
• A wiring guide for the table you have selected, drawn from your own roads at the angles they sit at. It covers both ways of wiring a fan and says which one needs a reverser.
• Signals stand beside the track in Decoration, and each one puts its own power unit under the board for the wires to run to.

LiveRail is a planning aid, not an electrical certificate.

Decoration

• Buildings. Eighteen roof patterns drawn from above, so a rectangle reads as a cottage, a works or a coal bunker.
• A building goes down at the size the real thing is, in one click, and then takes a corner drag or a typed size.
• Materials for the whole board. Brickwork, pots, glazing, leadwork, timber and yards are named rather than coloured, so a Pennine village gets stone stacks in one setting.
• Road vehicles. Twenty-one cars, vans and lorries, one of each per decade from the 1940s to the 2000s.

Room and baseboards

• Every corner is drawn on every wall. Solid where the joint is made, hollow where a wall end is free.
• Walls are measured to their inside face, with mitred corners, so the length you type is the length of floor you get along it.
• Islands. A hole in the board for an operating well, an access hatch, or the space a hill is built down into. A join divides the board where it cuts, and a section's area counts the timber rather than the hole.
• Feet and inches reach everything the app measures for itself. Type 8ft 4in, 8′ 4″ or 3/4″ into a room, board, spacer or tape field and it comes back in millimetres.
• Manufacturers’ figures stay in millimetres. Peco quote 438mm for 2nd radius and nothing on the box says 17 and a quarter inches.

Export

• Export the plan as a picture, with the scenery as you painted it or as a bare line drawing. The dialog opens on the size that suits your board, judged on whether the part numbers will still be readable.
• Free text labels come out in the picture at the size you drew them.

Licence

• Licence keys. Activate yours from the App menu.
• A key is checked once a day and keeps working for 30 days without a connection.

Room

• Draw the room to size, with walls, doors and a figure standing in it for scale.
• Skip it if you already know your space by heart. Nothing later depends on it.

Baseboards

• Draw the board whole, then split it into sections at the dimensions you want.
• Awkward shapes, and boards that run around the walls.
• Wiring zones drawn per board, so each section carries its own feeds.
• Feet and inches shown next to the millimetres, on the room, the baseboard and the tape measure.

Planner

• The Hornby and Peco OO catalogues, drawn from real geometry rather than approximated: Setrack, Streamline and the full Code 100 range.
• Points, crossings, single and double slips, three way points, catch points and buffer stops, each drawn as the part you would actually buy.
• Flexible track, laid by clicking along the curve you want.
• Track spacers that hold correct parallel spacing and never appear on the finished plan.
• Turntables.
• Ready made plans to start from, or to pull apart and make your own.
• Heights and gradients: a height where two pieces meet, or a gradient along a whole section of track at once, read as a percentage or as 1 in X.
• Hold shift to keep laying piece after piece, and scroll to step back through the parts you used last.
• Bridges and tunnels.
• Layers, groups and labels, for keeping a big layout under control.

Wiring

• DC and DCC, including the difference that catches people out: on DC the controller decides direction, on DCC the loco does.
• Droppers, bus runs, terminal blocks and distribution blocks, drawn where they really go, on top of the board or underneath it.
• Insulfrog, Electrofrog and Unifrog all handled properly, with each frog telling you what it needs.
• Point motors picked from a catalogue, which then grow the wiring that goes with them.
• The points, their motors and their switches build a switch panel, so every point on the layout is worked from one place.
• DCC power districts and reversing loops.
• Wire gauge sizing from a real ampacity table, so a run that is too thin says so.
• Shorts and dead sections found on the plan, before anything is soldered.
• A “learn more” article on every part: what it is, what it does, and why it is wired that way.

LiveRail is a planning aid, not an electrical certificate.

Decoration

• Ballast laid along the track.
• Board sections painted in.
• A paint brush, a texture spray and a ballast brush, each keeping its own colour.
• An eraser that lifts any of them back off again.
• Station platforms, straight and curved, laid the same way track is.
• Roads.
• Tunnels: bury a run and it goes into the hillside, portals and all, with the scenery you painted carrying over the top.

Simulator

• Run a train on the plan you have just drawn.
• Will it pull that train: send the same rake off on a range of gradients at once and see where each one gives up.
• Clearance checking: a bridge too low stops the train underneath it, and a bridge with room to spare lets it through.
• Simple decouplers, so you can shunt: the app knows the difference between a coupling under tension and one being pushed.
• DCC handsets and a command station on screen.
• More than one loco running at once on a DCC layout, each on its own address and its own handset.
• Momentum, so a train takes time to gather speed and time to stop.
• Pulling power set against carriage weight and the gradient, which is what decides whether a train gets up the bank.

Workbench

• A shopping list of everything you have laid, checked against the track you already own.
• A track box for what is already in the loft. Those parts show in the planner's parts list and stay out of the shopping list, so you only price what you still have to buy.
• Real prices on it at the maker's published RRP, so the total is a number you can take to a shop. A part with no published price stays out of the sum and says so, rather than quietly counting as nothing.
• Full size 1:1 printout, tiled across A4 to A1, with trim marks and a printed 100 mm ruler on every sheet, so a “fit to page” mistake is caught before anyone cuts timber.

Getting started

• A short guided introduction the first time you open it, and tips that appear when you do something for the first time.
• Light and dark themes.
• Your layouts are ordinary files on your own machine. No account, no cloud.
• The app tells you when a new version is out. It does not update itself.