Estimated Capacity

Since Daily Operating Reports are not public knowledge, I was curious as to people's thoughts on Gatekeeper's capacity. With the last four roller coasters having relatively limited theoretical and real world capacity (pph), I was curious how Gatekeeper will perform compared to those other rides, and in general.

My guess is that John McCain: The Ride probably gets about 800 riders per hour, and MilF! About 1000+ (theoretical being in the 1200s). Probably about 700pph for Wicked Twister, and no clue for Dragster.

With a 1700+ pph theoretical capacity on Gatekeeper, do you think we will see real world numbers approaching 1500 pph?

After four Intamins in a row, I think it was time for Cedar Point to put in another high capacity ride. The less time people are spending in line mean more time to shop for gifts and play games, which could help with per-caps.

-Sam

Will someone please tell me what John McCain the ride is?

Rcoaster10, it is in my signature. But here is an explanation, since you are younger than many here:

In the 2000s, and possibly prior, John McCain was nicknamed the "Maverick Republican" by the media. He went on to use this nickname during his unsuccessful 2008 Presidential run. Since Maverick was a nickname used by McCain and/or the news media to describe him for many years, I started using John McCain's name when referring to the coaster.

I'm not a huge fan of John McCain, and I am not a huge fan of Maverick at Cedar Point. Both have great potential, but in the end failed to deliver!

Anyway, enough on politics. Now you know which ride I was writing about, so we can continue our discussion.

I like to give nicknames to rides. It goes back to when I was in college and was an even bigger Cedar Point enthusiast.

-Sam.

^ I don't know how you could say Maverick didn't deliver but ok, your opinion. Anyway like you said let's continue discussion. I think the 1500 pph is a good estimate. Obviously it'll be up and down on certain days but yeah that sounds about right. Oh quick question, is there any of those in-line fans in the Gatekeeper queue? This could be answered with one response. It doesn't need to be discussed for long and get this forum even more off course.

I didn't see any fans in line, but the line honestly never stopped moving, which was nice.

If someone takes a stopwatch and records the time between 10 dispatches in a row and takes an average, we know there are 32 passengers per train (in reality, there are less since there will be empties), we can get a number for capacity. I did not bother doing this opening weekend. It seemed to me that the dispatches were varying rather wildly so that is why taking several trains and getting an average is necessary. My guess is they are struggling to reach even 1000 per hour at this point. Getting 1500 pph requires an interval of under 80 seconds and while they might have hit that here or there, it wasn't commonplace. There is always going to be one train stacked on this ride because the lift moves so fast, but I was seeing the third train stacking or almost stacking quite a good number of times. That is over 2 minutes worth of time. At 2 minutes, your capacity is only 960 pph.

One thing I think they could do to help the interval is to get the gates open right away when the train parks. They seem to be waiting for most everyone disembarking to leave the platform before opening them and it is like 20-30 seconds before they can even get the next group into the seats. Also, you have the last few stragglers walking by getting nailed in the nuts by a gate opening, etc. I just think although it might be chaotic for the first 10 seconds and you might have the occasional asshat who tries to sit back down in the train or hop back in line, but people waiting will mostly police this kind of stuff and they'd be better served on average by just getting the gates open right away when the train parks.

It's theoretical capacity is 1710 per hour, now hitting that we know is god awfully hard. I would judge it to be only a tad below that with dispatch delays/stacking ect...The ride actually is very efficient when no issues happen. I watched the line go through and dispatch intervals to see how it was working. After talking with a friend working the ride, it is designed that as soon as the train drops off of the lift and clears the block, they can actually advance the next train, so that's it's theoretical capacity. Is this hit, seldomly yes, but overall no. Give the crew time and this might be more of a reality but we shall see. After observing if the train is dispatched and only slows down in the safety brakes and stops at the ready brakes that was a good dispatch because there would be one either up high on the lift or early in the course, and the next was already being loaded and advanced into the station. A few seconds later we have another dispatch and both trains advance, cycle restarted. So honestly a full queue is 2hr, 2hr30min, it moves 32 people per cycle, in say about three-four minutes. This thing is truly a people eater...

Moving 32 people every three minutes means only 20 dispatches per hour or 640 people per hour. That is no where near what they are aiming for. In my observation, it was no where near that bad though - I would say they were under 2 minutes pretty consistently at least, but rarely close to the sub 80 seconds or so that they are probably shooting for.

Hitting theoretical capacity of 1700 per hour means dispatching at a sub-68 second interval (approximately when the previous train crests/clears the big bunny hop). The only time I saw this happening was when they were running empties. 68 seconds is a faster interval than even Raptor so I think hitting it is unlikely to happen very often. I think 75-80 seconds could happen consistently if they get the gates open sooner. The seats are very easy to check (no bending over, no difficult seatbelts, etc) and they have three people on each side of the train so it's either 4 or 6 seats to check per person. The big hold up as I see it currently is getting the people through the gates and into the trains.

I think when it's all said and done, the queue will hold about 90 minutes or at most 2 hours worth of people.

MDOmnis said:
68 seconds is a faster interval than even Raptor

Gatekeeper doesn't have to worry about the lose articles though, so that's a time saver.

Well, not basketballs, bags, etc, but they still have bins there (4 per side I think with three compartments each) for shoes, glasses, etc. Like I said, I think the biggest hindrance to a better interval on opening weekend was them waiting until most people cleared out before opening the gates. I would think they'd experiment with that and try to see what works better. Maybe they already have and I am completely wrong, but I doubt it. ;)

Coming from someone who has run both, one ride op said GateKeeper's interval is pretty similar to Raptor. In some ways it's faster (riders don't cross the train to dump their shades), in some ways it's slower (they haven't quite figured out when to open the gates). I think the first week will be a real education, because they never really had the volume of people riding that they did until opening day.

I think the station is pretty wide, but I wonder why they didn't do the split gates on the platform like Millennium Force. They open faster and give an extra foot of room for people to move around.

Jeff said:

I think the station is pretty wide, but I wonder why they didn't do the split gates on the platform like Millennium Force. They open faster and give an extra foot of room for people to move around.

Bingo!

I found that when I was riding closer to the front, I would sometimes almost bang into the open gates while exiting. I hope this is a retrofit that can be done fairly easily. If this retrofit is not done, I think this could hurt capacity, or cause complaints and maybe even injuries.

-Sam

That would have been a really good idea. I saw a few people catch it in the nuts as they were walking by talking to someone and not paying attention. I still think there is plenty of room to maneuver even with the existing gates, but since they were waiting to open them up, they were catching exiting passengers by surprise. I think they'll figure out little ways to make it better than we've seen thus far.

It would probably be too much of a programming nightmare, but would opening the gates in a cascading fashion work? Opening each line up gradually as the station empties? That way those up front aren't waiting for the last people to leave the station. Granted, you're still going to only be as fast as the last person getting on the train, but you could have everyone's seat checked or close to it by then.

Well all gates are attached together by one motor, you can actually see this in the queue underneath the station. So moving one moves all, They'd have to hook a motor up to each gate and then prox switches on each gate to ba aware of it being open/closed...It's a pretty big nightmare lol

I don't think cascading gates would provide much advantage because you can't dispatch until the last person is checked and in this case, it would almost always be at the back of the train.

And yea, the gates are all physically tied together just like on most CP coasters with just one proxy (well, probably 2 on GK) so introducing a motor and proxy on every gate increases expense and the number of things that can go wrong (see Dragster). :)

I was watching the webcam yesterday and it looked like they were dispatching at about 80 seconds at least sometimes so maybe they've already made an adjustment. Obviously I wasn't there so I can't know for sure.

I may be going up possibly next weekend...I do plan on timing the sequence of events to try and get a good number down. It'll help pass the two hour queue time :P

Also I find it crazy McCain is possibly 900 per hour possibly on the DOR...Corkscrew got 900 in good hours if we had a good queue of people O.o...I know we have a good theoretical capacity but if we beat them...damn I feel special...Ganna have to consult with some other ride ops tonight and see if we beat them on DOR for hourly throughput

Too bad you weren't around before Corkscrew had seatbelts. I never worked the ride personally, but it looked like it was pretty fun and fast paced with the pedals and everything.

It was a blast...Probably favorite thing I ever worked...Short simple sweet...

Pedal popping is a blast too, especially when you race & knock all six cars if you're running dispatch. It was quite funny to see the new crew this year popping pedals slowly & barely hitting interval. Me being out of it since '11 and then going military the '12 season, I still actually have it in me..When I went to ride I almost accidentally locked my own car like I was test riding haha...Friend of mine working the ride kinda gave me a look like, DONT DO IT :P

Hey all! I can say we are putting out higher numbers than you think. Obviously we have been looking a different ways to keep the line moving as fast as possible. We have been very VERY close to the maximum capacity of 1,710!! We're moving!!