Extended Closure

mgou58:

Because it’s Friday, and we are one week closer to going to more limited operations with the Fall; I remember a communication course I took in college years ago in which the professor shared that a company with shareholders would announce bad news intentionally on a Friday to try and lessen the blow to its stock; and that the same concept would apply to mass layoffs: deliver the bad news to your impacted employees on a Friday, gives them the weekend to process it versus the middle of the week. I’m not sure how true this is today, but if I’m the park, and Zamperla hasn’t given me good news yet, I’d be thinking about an update either late today or late next Friday going into Labor Day IF the expectations internally are that TT2 won’t be able to re-open.

Wow man. Good call

veritas55:

No one did anything purposely wrong here, but to dismiss people being upset or feeling ripped off because th

The only thing I’m disappointed in is there is a fee to get my season pass extended. Far better than losing all the money but we didn’t ever use them. Hopefully it won’t be too much.

Only thing I want to know is, will the shirts next year say "Baby I'm ready to go again...... again" ?

At this point I would hope they are paying CP to be using this as a testing grounds for prototype development.

They've definitely been logging in a goooood amount of real world data. So they should, hypothetically, have a much better understanding of what needs to be done to make things work. I look forward to seeing how things develop from now till 2025 opening.

Maybe a dumb question here but does Cedar Fair (Six Flags) get some money back from Zamperla (or a discount) in a situation like this? I mean, they definitely should right?

There is usually a penalty or performance clause written into every contract.

Other people "in the know" will, um, know this, but my understanding is sometimes the payments to a company like Zamperla are not only contingent on meeting certain completion milestones but also on operational milestones.

But here, Zamperla formally turned the ride over to CP and it began operation (even if Zamperla stuck around for tweaks and up through the shut down), so I wonder if CP withheld any payment even after the handover.

In any event, I would be shocked if Zamperla hasn't made significant concessions, either monetarily right now, or in terms of future discounts. It wants to continue a good relationship with CF and, especially with the Six Flags merger (and CF apparently having key decisionmaking authority going-forward), CF has ENORMOUS buying market power right now. I'm pretty sure they can dicate terms (within reason) right now to a company seeking to break into the big-time coaster market.

And I can't think of any reason why the TT2 issues aren't fixed in the off-season.

This isn't a core underlying structural problem with the ride build itself (vs. Steel Curtain) or a fundamental problem with the launch system or sensor system (vs. TTD).

They just need to reinforce/ redesign the train. I'm not saying that's a minor issue at all, but I'd be surprised if it requires complete redesign or junking of the train. They just need time to complete the redesign, manufacture and test the parts. A couple months on-the-fly is different than the time they have now.

My guess is with the most recent simulation testing done through SolidWorks, the data showed Zamperla what the problems are. Now Zamperla needs to manufacture the parts needed for a proper fix, and it might take a while.

So they’re using Solidworks for FEA? Oh no. Sit tight, we may be here another year 😉

TTD 120mph:

Only thing I want to know is, will the shirts next year say "Baby I'm ready to go again...... again" ?

I want to know what elite enthusiast title those of us that got to ride during preview events/opening weekend get. Perhaps some sort of laminated card we can whip out of our pockets while talking to all of the commonfolk that didn't have the exclusive opportunity.

veritas55:

They just need to reinforce/ redesign the train.

That's a pretty big deal though! Aside from the fact that they are probably a million bucks each or so and someone needs to foot the bill for new ones, the Lightning trains were likely one of the big selling points in Zamperla's pitch to Cedar Point. Milled aluminum chassis, bolted together, no welds, less NDT, easy to work on, yadda yadda. These babies will solve all the problems you had with a piece flying off of the last trains and gorking a poor woman! That's all great assuming the design you came up with can withstand the forces of the ride the trains are running on. Clearly they could not.

Now, after six days of public operation, they've welded reinforcements to or replaced the wheel carriers, drilled into the spine to reinforce the bones of the chassis, wired up all sorts of sensors to measure flex/stress, and probably had the NDT guys taking residence in park housing! That doesn't even address why they've had the seats on and off countless times after brief testing periods. Could have been NDT on those or the bolts hold them to the chassis. All for a train that was supposed to be Zamperla's game changing pride and joy. Talk about a flop! If someone made a math error that wasn't caught and a redesigned train is going to be the solution, they probably knew that pretty early on and should have cut their losses and gotten started on that. What has this show for the last three months been? Was it just an effort to do enough to get the ride up and running for the season and wait for the new trains to arrive next year? Was it a lab session to understand what is happening and try to incorporate what is learned into the redesign? I certainly hope they don't continue tinkering and hacking at these things and call these frankenf%^&ed trains the final product. Talk about a terrible look for Zamperla and the park that closed the last iteration due to a problem with a train.

Can we be confident Zamperla even knows how to (re)design a train that will actually work? I thought this stuff was all calculated ahead of time with computers, reviewed by the world's best engineers, etc. Now they are modifying their original design in live view. I hate to be a pessimist and I do agree that the likely next step is a set of three freshly designed trains, but given what has happened so far with the Lightning trains, I'd be insisting on outside review from someone aside from Zamperla at this point.

Cartwright:
I want to know what elite enthusiast title those of us that got to ride during preview events/opening weekend get. Perhaps some sort of laminated card we can whip out of our pockets while talking to all of the commonfolk that didn't have the exclusive opportunity.

They already handed them out. They're actually Costco membership cards......

Ha! I did a literal lol at that

MDOmnis:

hat's a pretty big deal though! Aside from the fact that they are probably a million bucks each or so and someone needs to foot the bill for new ones, the Lightning trains were likely one of the big selling points in Zamperla's pitch to Cedar Point. Milled aluminum chassis, bolted together, no welds, less NDT, easy to work on, yadda yadda. These babies will solve all the problems you had with a piece flying off of the last trains and gorking a poor woman! That's all great assuming the design you came up with can withstand the forces of the ride the trains are running on. Clearly they could not.

You raise several good points. I'm probably underestimating the challenges of getting this trains right because -- as you pointed out -- we have had three months of frankensteining them and the results thus far led CP to just call the whole thing off for this season.

I just find it hard to believe the train was that under-designed to withstand these forces. Or that a reasonable fix isn't in sight -- just needs time for manufacturer.

Epic fail but unsurprising. Glad I took the plunge in April to catch the ride during passholder previews. Slightly frightened looking back on the fact that might have been a quasi-dangerous decision given the trains are defective.

Looking back on this again, I'm suspicious the trains were actually jeopardizing the integrity of the track as well, and I stand by my position that they would have taken a higher nightly maintenance cost on the trains if it were technically feasible to maintain operations. Whatever was happening was short of catastrophic. Thank god they found it when they did.

MDOmnis:

That's a pretty big deal though! Aside from the fact that they are probably a million bucks each or so and someone needs to foot the bill for new ones, the Lightning trains were likely one of the big selling points in Zamperla's pitch to Cedar Point. Milled aluminum chassis, bolted together, no welds, less NDT, easy to work on, yadda yadda. These babies will solve all the problems you had with a piece flying off of the last trains and gorking a poor woman! That's all great assuming the design you came up with can withstand the forces of the ride the trains are running on. Clearly they could not.

The success of mechanical and structural design does not only rest on the math but also the material science. Perhaps something in the grade of material being used or the machining process did not work out in the real world the way the math would have suggested. That said, proper safety factors of design should account for the unknowns.

I am a bit surprised that TT2 is having this deep of issues with physical structural components like trains. TTD ran for nearly two decades with minimal structural issues with the trains or track. Aside from the initial issues with the theme components of the original trains, most of the big issues rested in the control systems and the track-side launch components until the metal bracket incident. You would have thought Zamperla would have studied the existing trains extensively from a structural standpoint to understand what had worked. When it comes to the forces for this ride, they are no higher than the old version in practice and the forces at launch are significantly lower and better distributed.

Big black eye for Zamperla.

magdrag95:

Whatever was happening was short of catastrophic. Thank god they found it when they did.

There is no proof of this.

If be interested in not just what the issue was, but how and when they caught it and when in the process they decided to pull the plug back in may. Was it visible damage? Was it sensors tripping or velocity not matching expectation? Or something else.