@francis-newman the way I think about the difference is like this:
- a route is a list of waypoints from which the actual way to go can/must be calculated, by combining it with a map, settings and a navigation algorithm
- a track is either the results of the calculation mentioned above (a route-track in MRA) or the result of someone recording their GPS data on a drive/ride (a track-log in MRA)
The main advantage of a route is that it contains identifiable waypoints that can be shown and announced by a navigation device/app when driving the route. Another advantage is that it can easily be manipulated by adding/removing or moving waypoints, which makes it suitable for editing. The main disadvantage is that the route can vary based on the map, settings and algorithm used by each specific device or app and can therefore be different for different users, which can be an issue if you're trying to drive a route with a group.
The main advantage of a track is that it's fixed and can't easily be changed, so it should be mostly the same between users/devices/apps. De main disadvantage is that it contains no waypoints, so there won't be any announcements of those.
Different file formats can contain either just the route, just the track or both.
And to answer your other question: yes, you should be able to import your route-only file into MRA. In fact, MRA supports KML files too, so you can just import that directly. You can then either save it in a format TomTom understands (I always use the 'GPX 1.1 (route, track, POI)' option), save directly to TomTom MyDrive from MRA or use the MRA connector to save it directly to you TomTom device.