Tried XTrackCAD, RailModeller, and Empire Express on for size...
…this summer, and I’m happy to share my impressions. By the way, I use a stock, three-year-old MacBook Pro running Mavericks. And I have no interests, financial or otherwise, in any of the products I’m about to discuss.
Before getting into the critique, I want to express appreciation for the fact that all of these products reflect considerable investment and thought in their development. I suspect that all three of them were developed by small enterprises, and I commend each vendor’s commitment to put a quality product on the market.
INSTALLATION AND STABILITY
Both RailModeller and Empire Express were a breeze to install. While I haven’t used RailModeller much and can’t really comment on its stability, I’ve found Empire Express to be very stable with no reliability concerns.
XTrackCAD takes some bizarre file management gyrations to get it to even start up on the Mac; these really shouldn’t be necessary. I also found the program to have crashing and freezing problems, and over time it introduced random artifacts that I couldn’t get rid of…a very strange bug indeed. I love open-source software in principle, but assuming your hobby is trains and not software development, I regret that I can’t recommend XTrackCAD in its current incarnation. I do hope that the dedicated XTrackCAD team is able to eventually produce a package that Mac users can reliably implement, as the product has great potential.
LEARNING CURVE AND SUPPORT
In my opinion, XTrackCAD has the steepest learning curve and the most quirks of the three products I tested. It has some weird (to me) workflows about it that can necessitate a bit of Googling and practice to figure out and get used to. However, it also seems to have the most robust and technically-oriented user community, including a Yahoo group where you can turn for answers to any questions you encounter.
I found Empire Express to be at the opposite end of the spectrum: it’s built specifically for Mac, and its features and tools are very intuitive, familiar, and easy for Mac users to learn. Empire Express doesn’t seem to have quite as many bells and whistles as Rail Modeller, but assuming it meets your needs, it may be a bit quicker to learn and get up and running. RailModeller is also Mac-centric and well-designed, though, with nice YouTube tutorials and a robust manual.
FEATURES
All three packages are drag-and-drop editors with adequate components libraries (track, scenic elements, etc.) and all the essential functionalities (snapping components together, parts list generation, etc.). XTrackCAD is probably the most comprehensive; for me, one of its most useful features is the ability to conduct simulated operations on the layout you design. I found this feature to be super-helpful in screening designs for viability—e.g., is that runaround going to be long enough, does this arrangement of facing and trailing point switches lend itself to realistic operations, etc. I also like that XTrackCAD allows you to display the track as a centerline, rails, or rails and ties, which is kind of nice. On features alone, XTrackCAD would be my first choice if it were stable and user-friendly.
Empire Express is definitely sufficient for most general layout planning. There are some feature gaps that I would like to see addressed—for example, you can’t lock your benchwork down so you don’t accidentally move it when you miss clicking on a track element, and you can only represent track as centerlines rather than as a pair of rails (which makes it tricky to estimate proximity, visualize the location of switch points, and place trackside structures with just the right amount of clearance). That said, the layering and 3D modeling capabilities of RailModeller are a bit more than I need at the moment, although they’re really nice features if you have terrain to represent and I think I may revisit RailModeller in the not-too-distant future.
OUTPUT OPTIONS
Fail, fail, and fail. Best I can tell, all you can do with your design in any of these packages is output to near-useless file formats like PDF, JPEG, etc….sure, you can view, email, and print those, but you can do that with a design you created using a pencil and papyrus too. None of these three products let you actually share or interactively collaborate on designs with other users like you could if the programs would output to a standard file format. (RailModeller’s website states that they’re working on export to SVG for a future release). Note that the lack of an interoperable, standardized file format isn’t an omission that’s unique to these three products; rather, it seems to be a failure of the layout design software industry as a whole. In fact, I only know of a couple of products—all of them on the Windows side—that provide for any file interoperability. Hopefully the NMRA standards folks will take note and help us out on that front before too long.
BOTTOM LINE
I’m using Empire Express for the moment, and I’m satisfied with it. I’m pretty sure I could be equally happy with RailModeller; the only reason I’m not currently using it is that it’s a little more robust than I need for planning my humble shelf layout and Free-Mo module. Both seem like fine products for general layout design. I really wanted to embrace XTrackCAD, and there are things I like about it, but my experiences with it were frustrating enough that I uninstalled it.
I hope these basic impressions are helpful, and apologies to the vendors if I missed any important considerations or got any specs wrong. And to rfbranch, good luck and happy designing!
