This about access violation from Mike Rennie of Smokebox.

[Trev123]

I've found out that the Workshop is largely responsible for the frequent "Access Violation" errors. If you get such an error when starting TS (sometimes you might get as far as the bouncy buttons in the main menu before it happens), you should unsubscribe from all recently subscribed Workshop scenarios (you can do this either in-game or by going to the Workshop via the Steam client).

The problem is that when the game downloads a Workshop scenario, the ScenarioProperties.xml file often gets corrupted (it will contain garbled text), and the errors are not checked or corrected. When the game then tries to use the file, it crashes with Access Violation.

When you subscribe to Workshop scenarios, do them one at a time. After each one, search for the most recent ScenarioProperties.xml in your Railworks\Content sub-folders. Open it in a browser and see if it contains anything that looks garbled (usually it'll be something with "Nul" in it and blank spaces where there should obviously be text or pathnames/filenames that are clearly missing some characters). If it is garbled, unsubscribe from the scenario and check to make sure you can start TS without error. Then you can re-subscribe to the scenario and go through the process again until you're sure you've succeeded in downloading a completely valid ScenarioProperties.xml file.

[gptech]

Very much wat Chris Laurence has been saying for ages, so corroboration of that can only be seen as a step forward---thanks for posting that Trev.

One work round is to get your workshop items in a slightly different way....rename your Routes folder to RoutesX and subscribe. You won't then have the route dependancies to have that scenario install, but it will still download in a .zip archive in your ..\steamapps\workshop\downloads folder----just do a search by "todays date" to find the most recently added files if you have a load in there. This you can then open and install the content manually, unsubscribe from the item and enjoy, after obviously renaming the RoutesX folder back to Routes.
It would seem to be the local installation of the items that causes bother, rather than the Workshop itself or the transfer process.

EDIT: The issue was certainly suspected, if not fully realised in late 2015 (http://forums.uktrainsim.com/viewtopic. ... 4&t=143468) and once again in late 2017 (https://forums.uktrainsim.com/viewtopic ... s#p1830607)

[peterfhayes]

Gary
As you and Mike S know, I have posted this before - using NameMyRoute if you see this "error" then you usually have a corrupt WS scenario:

[Scenario GUID reading ScenarioProperties.xml failed – ‘.’, hexadecimal value 0x00, is an invalid character. Line xx, position xx]

This won't always crash TS2019 at the scenario db build, ie "Access Violation" but it may cause other problems.

Regards

pH

[chrisonline]

Very much wat Chris Laurence has been saying for ages, so corroboration of that can only be seen as a step forward---thanks for posting that Trev.

Thank you, Gary, I was beginning to think no one was listening

In my opinion, the single most important thing is to download ONE WS item at a time, and check it before moving on. This very evening I broke my own rule, downloaded two together, found neither downloaded correctly, and then wasted another 20 mintues getting them fully unsubscribed from both my system and the WS subscription and reinstalled correctly.