Hi Michael,

Thanks for troubleshooting and, of course, the very useful rtracklayer package. Here is the sample data: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/kjaggkizixpg0uj/data.txt

Script:

> library(rtracklayer)
> data <- read.table("data.txt", sep = "\t")
> colnames(data) <- c("chromosome", "start", "end", "rate", "strand")
> targetRanges <- IRanges(data$start,data$end)
> targetTrack <- with(data,GRangesForUCSCGenome("hg19", chromosome, targetRanges, strand=strand, score=rate))
Error in GRangesForGenome(genome, chrom = chrom, ranges = ranges, method = "UCSC",  : 
  Failed to obtain information for genome 'hg19'

> sessionInfo()
R version 3.1.0 (2014-04-10)
Platform: x86_64-w64-mingw32/x64 (64-bit)

locale:
[1] LC_COLLATE=English_United Kingdom.1252  LC_CTYPE=English_United Kingdom.1252   
[3] LC_MONETARY=English_United Kingdom.1252 LC_NUMERIC=C                           
[5] LC_TIME=English_United Kingdom.1252    

attached base packages:
[1] stats4    parallel  stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base     

other attached packages:
 [1] BSgenome.Hsapiens.UCSC.hg19_1.4.0 BSgenome_1.34.1                   Biostrings_2.34.1                
 [4] XVector_0.6.0                     rtracklayer_1.26.3                GenomicRanges_1.18.4             
 [7] GenomeInfoDb_1.2.5                IRanges_2.0.1                     S4Vectors_0.4.0                  
[10] BiocGenerics_0.12.1               BiocInstaller_1.16.5             

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
 [1] base64enc_0.1-3         BatchJobs_1.6           BBmisc_1.9              BiocParallel_1.0.3     
 [5] bitops_1.0-6            brew_1.0-6              checkmate_1.6.2         codetools_0.2-14       
 [9] DBI_0.3.1               digest_0.6.8            fail_1.3                foreach_1.4.2          
[13] GenomicAlignments_1.2.2 iterators_1.0.7         magrittr_1.5            RCurl_1.95-4.7         
[17] Rsamtools_1.18.3        RSQLite_1.0.0           sendmailR_1.2-1         stringi_0.5-5          
[21] stringr_1.0.0           tools_3.1.0             XML_3.98-1.3            zlibbioc_1.12.0

As said, "hg38" works, but not "hg19". I also found that GRangesForBSGenome (instead of GRangesForUCSCGenome) works. 

Many thanks,

Walfred