The Suspended Monorail is a Transport Ride in RollerCoaster Tycoon 1 and 2, available in RCT1's Corkscrew Follies DLC and all future installments.

(Suspended Monorail 1 at Future World - The only pre-existing Suspended Monorail in all of RCT1 & 2)

“Powered trains hanging from a single rail transport people around the park.” - In-game description

Table of Contents

Transport Ride General Information

Mechanics Specific to Transport Rides

(This section is present on all Transport Ride guides. It is put inside a spoiler to avoid repetition.)

Transport Rides are rides that exist to move guests around the park quickly and without tiring them out. They are generally quite cheap to build per track piece, although because Transport Rides are designed to be quite long to allow guests to access faraway areas of the park, their total cost to build can sneak up on you. If you wish to, Transport Rides can also be built as one station, functioning as a Gentle Ride of sorts, although sacrificing the ability to disperse guests around the park is also cutting out potential profit since it will only be accessible from one area of the park.

Despite their function, guests do not view Transport Rides any differently than other ride types, meaning that guests who tend to gravitate towards more intense rides will generally refuse to ride them. Guest pathfinding also does not take Transport Rides into account and they will not use them to get to a specific place in the park quicker or without expending as much energy. Guests will ride Transport Rides, but they will not do so with the intent of getting to a specific area of the park, and whenever they get on one, they will always exit the ride on the very next station (if it has an exit building).

Transport Rides also have a unique ability in that they can make any guest ride them if they are free. If a Transport Ride is free, then a guest will always be willing to get on the ride even if they are extremely unhappy and desperate to go home. This function presumably exists to emulate the aforementioned pathfinding element of using them to get to the park entrance quicker, although it can also have the opposite effect and keep them in your park for longer, which tends to take a cut of your park rating. This downside can be eliminated if the only station on the Transport Ride with an exit building is one very close to your park entrance. This can be used as a means of helping lost guests find the park exit, although this will also disperse every other guest who gets on the ride to the exit as well, meaning that they won’t be in your other park areas. The other downside of this is that you’re obviously not making any money with a free ride, so this should only be considered if you’re making enough money to comfortably offset the ride’s operating cost and make an extra profit on top of that. If you're playing in a park with unlimited money (like Arid Heights or Lucky Lake), all Transport Rides will count as "free" and this functionality will be enabled.

One implication of this feature is that if a part of your park is isolated from the rest and only accessible via a free Transport Ride, then the guests will eventually find their way back to the main area of the park by taking the Transport Ride back again. This is still a terrible idea as this leaves guests prone to becoming unhappy because they will attempt to navigate to a ride that’s in the main area of the park and won’t be able to detect that they need to take the Transport Ride back.

In spite of their noticeable downsides, Transport Rides can be quite good and building one in a large park is sometimes very useful as they have many advantages. Even though the guests won’t intentionally use it for this purpose, it will still help move guests around your park, and due to their very high ride capacity, can help fight overcrowding and make more money than you might expect since a larger number of guests can board them all at one time. Most Transport Ride vehicles are also sheltered meaning that they will provide a reliable source of ridership during a rainstorm.

In RollerCoaster Tycoon 1, all Transport Rides count as Gentle Rides for the purposes of Research. In future games, Transport Rides are their own Research option.

Transport Rides have low base Excitement Ratings, and are never intense or nauseating either. All of them having a base Intensity and Nausea of 0.50 or lower, and modifiers to those stats are not nearly as prominent as they are on other tracked rides. The Monorail and Miniature Railway in fact start with 0.00 for both of these stats and the only way that either of those two rides can increase this is through their max speed, average speed, and underground sections.

As long as your Transport Rides don’t fail any stat requirements, it is completely impossible for them to have stats lower than these. The Monorail for instance will never have an Excitement Rating of lower than 2.00 if you meet both stat requirements. Their low Intensity Rating means that they’re really good for guests who prefer less intense rides (doubly so for parks like Gentle Glen, which applies this intensity preference all around), although this also means that thrill-seeking guests will tend to complain that the ride isn’t intense enough and not ride them (again, guests do not view Transport Rides differently than normal rides). Their Nausea Rating is virtually nonexistent, so guests won’t become sick from being on the ride, although they might still throw up around the ride due to being sick from other rides in close proximity to the Transport Ride.

The amount of Park Value that Transport Rides contribute to your park is roughly average for non-coaster tracked rides. The Monorails and Miniature Railway all share a very interesting distinction of being the only rides in the game that feature a negative number in their Park Value contribution multipliers. In the case of all three, their Nausea Rating has a contribution multiplier of -10. This means that the Nausea Rating of these rides will actually detract from your Park Value, although since their Nausea Ratings are always very low, this has a very minimal effect overall, and the other two ratings will more than offset the Nausea penalty. All Transport Rides have a similarly average contribution to the soft guest cap, though in the case of the Miniature Railway and both Monorails, this amount will be low in relation to the amount of money you’ll most likely need to spend to build the ride.

Pre-Built Designs

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Building Information

  • Base Cost: $1,996.00 (RCT1)/$2,006.70 (OpenRCT2)

Stats (with default setup)

  • Excitement Rating: 2.73
  • Intensity Rating: 0.46
  • Nausea Rating: 0.13

Ride Length

  • Distance: 685ft (209m)
  • Time: 40 seconds

Other Information

  • Default vehicle: RCT1 Suspended Monorail Trains

Technical Information

Stats

  • Base Excitement Rating: 2.00
  • Base Intensity Rating: 0.00
  • Base Nausea Rating: 0.00

Stat Requirements

  • Length of at least 558ft (170m)
  • Less than 50% of the track underground

The Length requirement will divide all three of the ride's stats by 2 if it isn't met, whereas the underground requirement will divide only the Excitement Rating by 4.

Stat Contribution Values

  • Excitement Rating Value Multiplier: 70
  • Intensity Rating Value Multiplier: 6
  • Nausea Rating Value Multiplier: -10
  • Soft Guest Cap Contribution: 60

Building Information

  • Cost of Station Piece on Fully Flat Ground: $48.00 (Vanilla RCT2)/$48.70 (OpenRCT2)
  • Cost of Straight Track Piece on Fully Flat Ground: $32.00 (Vanilla RCT2)/$32.50 (OpenRCT2)
  • Cost of Supports (per unit per tile): $2.50*
  • Support Height Limit (ft/m/height units): 50ft/15m/+10

*Vanilla RCT2 does not decimal points in its support costs. Instead it will round down or round up to the next whole dollar amount at certain height intervals to equalize the amount as if it were spending a decimal amount. In OpenRCT2, it will correctly spend the decimal amount every time.

Building a Suspended Monorail

As the name would imply, the Suspended Monorail, is a variant of the standard Monorail where the trains are suspended from underneath the rail instead of on top of it. As such, the Suspended Monorail comes with a much higher support limit than its un-suspended counterpart. With a support limit of 10 units of height off the ground, it is much better at building over your park compared to the 5 and 6 unit limit of the Miniature Railway and standard Monorail, also making it an appealing choice if you wish to build a Transport Ride in a more hilly park.

The Suspended Monorail however has two downsides that work against this upside somewhat. The first is the fact that while every non-inverted ride in the game only needs two units of clearance to build over or under something, some inverted rides need three. This includes the Suspended Monorail. It may have a larger support limit, but you've really got to use it if you plan on building it in a park that's already fairly developed.

The other is the fact that the Suspended Monorail is the most expensive Transport Ride in the game to build. It has the exact same price for all track pieces as the Chairlift, but while the Chairlift's extremely low support cost makes the ride cheaper off the ground than its competitors, the Suspended Monorail has a support cost of $2.50 per unit per tile. Even at just a few height units off the ground, the increase of price of track pieces will build up and result in the ride becoming dramatically more expensive to build than you might expect.

Still, the ability to keep its track higher off the ground compared to the standard Monorail is just generally really useful. In parks with lots of elevation changes everywhere, it's much easier to keep the track flat to avoid the speed penalty of going uphill, and being able to build over everything means no more having to awkwardly weave your way around complex roller coasters and oddly-shaped mountain ranges. If you notice your park's landscape has a lot of rises and dips, keep this in mind if you're thinking of building a Transport Ride.

Just like the Monorail and Suspended Monorail, you will want to keep the track as flat as possible because these rides do not enjoy needing to go up hill.

Stats

The Suspended Monorail has the same base stats as the regular Monorail and has very similar stat bonus values, although it does get higher bonuses to Excitement from scenery and being near other rides. As a result, the stats of the Suspended Monorail are generally quite decent for a Transport Ride. Just like the other Transport Rides, it has a length requirement and a track underground requirement to meet. This is actually the exact same as the regular Monorail, of needing at least 558ft (170m) of track and less than 50% of the track underground.

The Suspended Monorail also has the same stat value multipliers as the regular Monorail. Overall, it'll likely have a very similar Excitement Rating and ticket price than a regular Monorail of the same design. It however will lose to the regular Monorail in throughput due to the fact that the Monorail's Streamlined Trains are over 50% faster than the Suspended Monorail Trains, and can hold more than twice the number of guests per train.

Unlike the Miniature Railway and the Chairlift, the Suspended Monorail (and also the standard Monorail) has a positive bonus value to its Excitement for being underground, meaning that you're more than free to thread the needled between having 0% of the track underground and 50% underground to get the most out of the underground bonus whilst still meeting the stat requirement.

The Miniature Railway, Monorail, and Suspended Monorail, all share a unique distinction of being the only rides in the entire game with a negative number in their ratings multiplier values. In the case of these three rides, all of them have a Nausea Rating value multiplier of -10.

This means that the Nausea Rating of your Suspended Monorail would, in theory, detract from its maximum ticket price and your park value. However, because the Nausea Rating for all three of these rides are so always so small, the effect this has is virtually non-existent.

Vehicles

Similar to the Elevator, the Suspended Monorail only has one vehicle type which comes in two different styles:

The standard Suspended Monorail Trains comes with the Corkscrew Follies expansion pack for RCT1 as does the ride itself, whereas the Airship Themed Monorail Trains comes with the Time Twister expansion pack for RCT2.

Both trains have a maximum capacity of 8 passengers per car with a maximum train length of 4 cars per train for a total of 32 guests per train, and they each have a top speed of 14mph (22km/h). In terms of performance, this renders both trains functionally identical to each other, but the standard Suspended Monorail Trains are slightly shorter, meaning that less track is needed for it to be able to hold more cars. No matter which train type you use, either of them can operate in Shuttle Mode and are sheltered from the rain. In stark contrast to all other Transport Rides carried over from RCT1, no version of the car has any stat modifiers.

Verdict

The Suspended Monorail is a very situational Transport Ride. Compared to the standard Monorail, it's much more expensive to build, and its throughput and profit potential are nowhere near as good due to the fact the trains hold a lot less guests than the Streamlined Monorail Trains (and even less guests than a full-size Miniature Railway train) and runs at about two-thirds of the top speed as those trains. It's still generally better than the Miniature Railway due to the fact that its top speed is the same as the Small Monorail Cars, which are itself 4mph faster than the Trams. However, there's rarely ever a reason to consider building the Suspended Monorail over a standard one.

Key word there being "rarely", and not never. It has a lot of downsides compared to the Monorail, but its higher support limit single-handedly saves the ride in some situations due to the fact it can more easily navigate mountainous terrain and stay flat over your entire park easier than the Monorail can. On a park with not much elevation, the standard Monorail is unquestionably the way to go, but on a park with lots of hills, it's worth keeping the Suspended Monorail in your back pocket.

Other Transport Rides