New to RCt1, and have some problems in the "Forest" scenaio -- I'd be grateful for any advice on how to recover.

1) I have a standard wooden rollercoaster, only a few months old, and suddenly the trains collided at the station. (I thought such things happened on aging rides that needed to be replaced?) The explosion was pretty spectacular, I have to say, but it killed 26 people! Now I'm not sure how to repair the ride, or get it running again. I closed the ride, but I don't seem to be able to demolish the burnt track, nor rebuild over it with new sections. Double-clicking on the red light in the ride properties (as suggested in the manual) doesn't summon my engineers or get them fixing the thing, and neither does placing them at the ride itself. How do I get the ride up and running again? (And is there anything I need to do about the victims, or do the deaths just damage my safety and approval ratings, and then life goes on?)

2) Similarly, I built a steel "Rodent" coaster, but it reports that Car 2 hasn't returned to the station and may be stuck or broken down. I've moved engineers to the ride, but they just walk away again. They don't seem to see anything they need to fix. The graphics indicate the ride isn't moving, people are getting cross at waiting in line, and the ride reports passengers already on the ride want to get off and are getting *very* unhappy. (I don't blame them! They've been stuck on the ride for more than a month!! ;-) )

What do I do with these rides? Are these just unrecoverable glitches, and I have to demolish the ride and rebuild it? Or is there something I can do?

I have read the manual, so if I missed the solution please forgive me. I'd be grateful for any help.

1) Repair by mechanics and that reset from closing twice are two independant things, which both need to happen before you can open again. You need to do nothing special to get the mechanic there, its like any other non-crash breakdown, if there is one assigned to the coaster he will eventually get around to it. The double close just gives you a fresh set of trains. Not every crash requires repair, if nothing is broken just reset and open again.

2) The double close reset is your friend again. If you pause the game before doing it, unpausing only once its open again, the queuing peeps even stay around if youre playing rct1, otherwise they run off.

A guess what happened there: your mouse had a normal breakdown, no crash and now a car, not necessarily the one from the message, is sitting in a spot thats usually passed at speed and has no way to build momentum again from there. Sometimes other cars bumping into it from behind nudge it forward enough to get unstuck, but then the next car sits there... reset to start over.

Unless the coaster is doing that twice a year just reset when you get the message, keep it in mind when your park ages and downtime becomes more frequent to replace this one rather sooner than later to avoid the problem. But scenarios don't really last long enough to start replacing coasters usually.

Nothing else you really need to do after crashes. For a while peeps will say "I'm not going on x, its not safe" but that tapers off after some months, and a few don't care and ride it anyway right after reopening. The crash is a big one-time drop in mood for everyone, even peeps not involved at all. The "unsafe" thought might be slightly bad as well, but not enough to worry. Only thing to do here is checking the coaster if you can change something about its design that makes future crashes less likely. Station brake failures occur at any age, they just become more frequent as a coaster ages. If your station is on a hill, with the train pulling up into it instead of coming down a drop you're pretty safe, but can't build all coasters like that. I set everything to 10 minutes check time as soon as I build them to keep things in the best shape possible, doesn't prevent breakdowns but makes them less frequent.

Thanks for all that info, flickas, it's much appreciated. What I still don't understand, though, is what exactly I need to do to get these two rides running again.

1) With the wooden coaster, a section of the track and most of the cars were destroyed in the explosion. The engineers don't repair them, and if I go into construction mode I can't remove the damaged track, and it also won't let me just build new track over where the burnt track is. How exactly do I repair the ride?

2) With the Mouse, I understand what you're saying about a car being stalled somewhere like at the base of an incline or curve, without momentum to get moving again. But *none* of the cars are moving, so how do I nudge the stalled one into motion?

I an't find an answer in the manual, or any pages I've found online, about stalled or broken-down rides that the engineers won't fix. Do I need to demolish the ride and buld a replacement?

1) the woodie: Wait for mechanic to finish his job. Close the already closed ride. Open it.
Track never gets destroyed, the station looks a bit like it's fuming, bubbles raising or something, thats only a visual reminder that the ride crashed and needs reset. You can do the double close before its fixed, but the game won't let you reopen. No rebuilding required at all, ignore my previous suggestions of tinkering with the layout, if you're just starting out it is unlikely you can improve the coaster by that. Maybe hire an additional mechanic if your existing ones are spread too thin already, if you're using patrol areas make sure the exit is included in one of them.

2) mouse: pause game, close ride, close ride again, open ride, unpause. You can't push them in any way. If the first car in the jam can't move forward, the rest piles up behind. Reset kicks out all riders and gives you shiny new cars that start in the station. Again don't mess with the build menu, just hope it won't happen again and if it does, repeat the reset.

Demolish and rebuild of course "fixes" these problems too because its a completely new, different ride which just happens to look somewhat similar, but complete overkill if a reset is all thats needed. Deleting some track pieces and rebuilding them does nothing at all, the game considers breakdowns for the ride as a whole and thats still the same.

Do not open the ride between those two closings, just click the red light once more.