The open source track planning software XTrackCAD is a fantastic tool in anyone playing with model railways but without a stable release in 5 years it’s lagged a little behind Apple’s operating system updates. Installing on OS X 10.10 does not work out of the box but if you follow these steps you’ll have a running application in no time.
- Download and install the latest XQuartz
You can get it from http://xquartz.macosforge.org.
- Download and install XTrackCAD as with earlier OS X installations
The files are hosted on the project sourceforge page.
- Make sure you have allowed access to applications from any developers
There are various instructions but try this walk through.
- Replace some out of date libraries in the XTrackCAD bundle
Open a terminal and execute the following commands:
cd /usr/lib
cp libxml2.2.dylib /Applications/XTrackCAD.app/Contents/Resources/lib/
cp libiconv.2.dylib /Applications/XTrackCAD.app/Contents/Resources/lib/
cp libz.1.dylib /Applications/XTrackCAD.app/Contents/Resources/lib/
There you go – everything should be working correctly after this. Thanks for the hints from tynewydd962 in the XTrackCAD forum.
Andy.xyz 
Andy
Thanks for this, just to add one note – If you had a working version of Xtrack under mavericks and you have just upgraded OS X to Yosemite then all you need to do is step 4 above.
Kevin
Hi Kevin, a good point you’re absolutely right. However I wouldn’t recommend upgrading to Yosemite – installing from scratch seems fine but i’ve seen too many problems with upgrades…
Hi Andy,
I followed your instructions for getting XtrackCAD to work on Yosemite but it’s not working. When I run Xtrk, Quartz starts up and then an information box opens saying “Creating /Users/jamesmiller/xtrkcad” with a No dialog box and Yes dialog box. If I secret Yes nothing happens. If No is selected then it says Cannot create /Users/jamesmiller/xtrkad.
Any idea what might be wrong?
Thanks.
Its possible you might need to be an admin user, have you got admin permissions set on the jamesmiller account?
Yes I do.