The Monorail is a Transport Ride in RollerCoaster Tycoon 1 and 2, available in RCT1's base game and all future installments.

(Metro in Six Flags Magic Mountain)

“Passengers travel in electric trains along a monorail track.” - 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: $2,507.00 (RCT1)/$2,520.60 (OpenRCT2)

Stats (with default setup)

  • Excitement Rating: 2.79
  • Intensity Rating: 0.21
  • Nausea Rating: 0.06

Ride Length

  • Distance: 633ft/344ft (193m/105m)
  • Time: 50 seconds/17 seconds

Other Information

  • Default vehicle: RCT1 Small Monorail Cars

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: $31.00 (Vanilla RCT2)/$31.50 (OpenRCT2)
  • Cost of Straight Track Piece on Fully Flat Ground: $21.00
  • Cost of Supports (per unit per tile): $2.00 (Vanilla RCT2)/$2.50 (OpenRCT2)
  • Support Height Limit (ft/m/height units): 30ft/9m/+6

Building a Monorail

The Monorail is basically an upgraded version of the Miniature Railway. It has access to everything that ride has, but it has a slightly higher support and all of its vehicles move faster. The only advantage of the Miniature Railway is that it’s slightly more expensive to build per track piece, although it’s still quite cheap. If one has access to the Streamlined Trains, it’s also the fastest Transport Ride in the game and the one with the highest guest capacity.

The Monorail also has a higher support limit than the Miniature Railway at 6 units of height off the ground as opposed to 5. This may not sound like much, but it makes it that much easier to build over your park instead of around it, which is the ideal situation for Transport Rides. The more you can build over without needing to build inclined tracks, the better. Its support cost is also lower than the Monorail meaning that you the price increase becomes much less noticeable if you build the rides high up.

This doesn't get around the unmistakable fact that this is still a very low support limit, and you might still have a lot of trouble building it in a developed park already. If you plan to build a Monorail anywhere in your park, you'll want to plan out a layout ahead of time and avoid building anything in the way of it until you're ready to build the Monorail.

One other downside of the Monorail, which it shares with the Miniature Railway and Suspended Monorail is its incredibly low top speed moving uphill of only 2mph (3km/h), so you should always keep the ride as flat as possible. Due to its support limit, this will be easier to do than the Miniature Railway, but harder than the Suspended Monorail. This also means that the Monorail may be quite difficult to build in parks with lots of sharp elevation changes.

Stats

The Monorail has lower base stats that the Miniature Railway, but it's still higher than all of the other Transport Rides in the game. In general, the ride will have lower stats than the Miniature Railway due to its lower base stats and similar bonus values, and since it has the same Excitement Rating multiplier value, it'll generally have a lower ticket price as well. It shares many of the bonus values of the Miniature Railway, except with slightly lower bonuses for ride duration and scenery. The Monorail has a lower train length bonus than the Miniature Railway, but since the Monorail also has a longer maximum train length, this will roughly equal itself out. Additionally, it has the same bonus for maximum speed and average speed, but the Monorail also runs at a higher maximum speed than the Miniature Railway.

Unlike the Miniature Railway and the Chairlift, the Monorail (and also the Suspended 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 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.

So far, the Monorail sounds roughly on par with the Miniature Railway, but there's one aspect of the ride that single-handedly makes it the best Transport Ride in the game...

Vehicles

... its vehicles. The Monorail has three different vehicle types:


1. Small Monorail Cars
2. Retro-Style Monorail Trains
3. Streamlined Monorail Trains

The Small Monorail Cars and Streamlined Monorail Trains are both available in RCT1's base game, whereas the Retro-Style Monorail Trains were added in RCT2. No matter which one you pick, all of them are sheltered vehicles meaning they will be ridden in the rain, and all of them can use Shuttle Mode.

The Small Monorail Cars and Retro-Style Monorail Trains are essentially reskins of each other. They both have a capacity of 4 guests per car with 6 cars per train for a total of 24 guests per train. They each have a top speed of 14mph (22km/h), which are the second-fastest Transport Ride vehicles in the game. The Small Monorail Cars are smaller, meaning that more total cars can fit on the train and their RCT1 and RCT2 versions both have an Excitement modifier meaning that there isn't really a reason to use the Retro-Style Monorail Trains unless you just really like the way they look over the Small Monorail Cars.

They're not what makes the Monorail so good though. That honor goes to the Streamlined Monorail Trains, which singlehandedly brings the Monorail from a decent Transport Ride to an amazing one. The Streamlined Monorail Trains are by far the fastest Transport Ride vehicle in the game with a top speed of 22mph (35km/h) on flat track, and have a much higher guest capacity than the other two Monorail vehicles. They have a maximum train length of 8 cars, which can hold 5 guests in the front and rear cars and 10 guests in all of the middle cars, which totals 70 guests in a maximum length train. This is the highest possible guest capacity of a single train in the entire game, which combined with its high top speed makes this the ultimate Transport Ride. If you charge for the rides, a Monorail with the Streamlined Trains and a decent ticket price can make quite a bit more money than you might expect.

If you're playing the RCT1 scenarios in RCT1, some of them will feature the Monorail but only the Small Monorail Cars will be available. If this occurs in a park you want to build a Monorail in, it may be worth it research Ride Improvements until the Streamlined Monorail Trains becomes researched.

Verdict

The Monorail is the best Transport Ride in the game (although depending on the park in question, the Chairlift is sometimes more useful), assuming you have access to the Streamlined Trains. If you have only the Small Monorail Cars or Retro-Style Monorail Trains, the Monorail is a decent Transport Ride that's a little bit better than the Miniature Railway due to its higher top speed and support limit. With the Streamlined Trains, it's utterly unmatched in its speed and guest storage.

If you need a ground-based Transport Ride, the Monorail is absolutely the way to go.

Other Transport Rides