Cedar Point Announces New Water Ride for 2010 Season

You beat me to the comment Jeff, sort of. :)

Looking around on the bird's eye view on Bing maps, it looks a path from the MF gate by the lift hill gives more overhead clearance on the access paths/roads back to the site for large parts/ construction equipment (but there is a 90 degree turn once inside the MF gate to negotiate and curve back around by the train station to get back to the access road back to the site ).

They could bring concrete trucks in/out through either of those 2 routes, (MF gate by lift hill or P&D gate via access road between Mine Ride and Skyhawk passing under SRF)

I wonder if most sections of the flume will be pre-fab concrete so they can cut down on the amount of onsite pouring they need to do.

That's an interesting idea, but given that they'll be holding water, I'd think it would be better to pour them into forms on-site. With pre-fab, you'd have to concern yourself with seams and so forth.

The second area being damned is farther down than I thought it would be. You can bareley see the truck dumping.

http://rollercoasterfreak.com/Cedar_Point/STR_Dirt_Bridge.jpg

What mortal sin did the second area commit?

Hahaha. Nice catch Break.

Oops :)

Thanks for the answers Jason and Jeff.

As far as the mention of pre-fab concrete, I agree with dj that seams and water aren't a good idea.

I agree with you guys that the seams would need attention, but you can use a mold to pour a seam between two pre-fab sections. I use to live in Los Angeles, and this is a technique used frequently on the freeway overpasses. Granted, they don't have to hold water, but the seams do have to robust to carry the structural loads of an earthquake.

If the designer is on his game, he could make it so all the sections have the same shape seam so only one mold is needed. This overall approach would seriously cut down on manpower, equipment, and on-site construction time. Be fun to watch which way they go.

Yeah, its certainly possible, Rapids. I just think that its probably easier to transport the components in parts and assemble them on-site. I'd imagine you could fit most of the rebar/steel on one or two trucks, and bring in the concrete truck-by-truck. Bringing in prefab pieces, you'd likely only be able to fit a couple straight pieces on a truck. And then there's the mess of having to deal with the larger, curved pieces.

Not to mention a crane to unload the pieces...

I realize they go through that with steel track and supports, but they have to...you can't build track on site.

Why not? Magnum was built that way.

As for pouring vs pre-fab (and granted I don't know a whole lot about concrete construction) wouldn't you end up with seams anyway as you have to allow for expansion? I can see where it would be easier to pour on-site because liquid concrete transports much more easily than formed concrete, but that doesn't seem to be the issue under discussion.

Seams are used in concrete, I believe, so that when damage occurs, its relatively easy to replace a section, rather than doing a lot of saw-cutting to isolate, remove and replace the broken concrete. They fill those seams with expansion joints, so that the pieces can expand and contract without crushing themselves. Again, I'm not sure how such expansion & contraction would impact the design of the trough for STR.

It wouldn't make a lot of sense to cast giant blocks of concrete somewhere else when they're all unique pieces that sit in the ground.

They've posted a blog update, showing where the 1st lift hill will be and how the dams will be used.

What they said was, it's where the first lift hill's electrical components will go.

Wow. Yeah, sorry.

So since they are draining the area they dammed off, where will they put that water?

Pump it over the dams and back into the rest of the lagoon.

Lots of very small plastic cups.