I have had exactly the same problem.I've had this same problem on the ship I'm working on, however it's not all rails. Some rails seem to work fine while others lock up. I'm not on any server, I just build in single player. I've literally deleted the rails and the docked entity and remade them from scratch and they still don't work. I've rebooted my game as well and still no luck. Everything else works fine, if I press a button the rails swap directions like they should but the docked entities simply don't budge. I know for a fact everything's set up properly since it worked before and I've poured over it to make sure nothing came undone. There's simply no explanation for why it doesn't work, it simply doesn't work.
Edit: Just to test I just threw down a row of rails and slapped a docked entity on it and same thing happened. I literally can't use rails and I have no idea why.
Edit: Upon more testing I've found out that it's only on my ship. If I make a new ship the rails work normally. What an arbitrary bug.
[doublepost=1478024449,1478024007][/doublepost]
Do you mean deleting the meta.smbph file?completely delete block and connection metadata