Forbidden Frontier on Adventure Island

There was a little jog between the two final drops and most riders were unaware. It caused them to experience a quick shift in their seat and occasionally (depending on which track and what side of the boat) a good lap soaking.
My roommate worked on Mill Race then StR and he loved/hated it. An op position was at the top of the second drop sitting literally in the central waterfall with water rushing around their legs. His stinky shoes never had a chance to dry out. The Cedars wasn’t exactly dry and breezy.

The drains at the back of the wwl boats is such a brilliant and cheap passive system. The fact that was overlooked with str is idiotic for an engineering firm, but Intamin has never done anything the easy way, esp in the eary 2000s.

I always enjoyed watching the water drain on the boat in front of us on the lift hill on wwl. You had to remember to pick up your feet if you were in the back seat.

djDaemon:

On StR there were pumps moving water from the base of each lift hill (which is the end/bottom of each trough/flume) to the beginning/top of each trough/flume, where it would travel back down the gentle slope of the trough toward the base of the lift. The pump buildings are still there next to where each lift was.

Which is the same as WWL's elevated flume sections, only at ground level. And the same is true of Thunder Canyon, which is why you see water rushing downhill in the videos showing that ride filling. And there's a pump house near TC's lift.

Or I guess I should say, that's how I've always presumed these things work.

No not exactly..

For example, lets take the elevated portion of WWL flume. Yes, in order to move the boats along, a substantial amount of water has to be flowing from the highest portion of the trough to the lowest which for this example is drop. BUT.. most of the water never actually flows down the drop itself. At this point, the boat enters the drop portion and is almost dry going down the mechanical drop, very little water accompanies the boat in the drop. As the water in the trough flows to the point of the drop, most of it is collected and pumped back to the beginning (highest elevation) of the trough.

This is a tremendously lower energy requirement to pump the large volume of water only a few feet of elevation (from end of trough to beginning of trough) vs pumping from the bottom of the lift hill all the way up to the elevated portion.

The pumps you are referring to are used to initially fill the elevated portion of the trough as well as to "top off" any loss of water that makes it way down the drop hill.

Really? I always thought that was the main spine (typical arrow track design) supporting each trough section. I think there was actually gaps where each of the sections were joined at a support column. There's plenty of photos on this site to examine, including the demo photos.

That's track spine, and you'll be hard pressed to convince me that it's big enough to push that volume of water. There were no visible pumps up there. The pipes from the ground were huge. If it were a closed system, it wouldn't empty out.

Pretty sure the pumps that bring water up, bring it up at a rate that allows the trough to stay full but also allow just enough to flow over the drop. There are additional pumps that continue the flow forward around the lower trough back to the platform and into the resevor and the process continues all over again. This picture shows there is a break in between each spine section, making the spine purely for structure/support only.

On the other hand, Snake River Falls DOES have a closed loop on the elevated track, between the lift and the large drop, and the gigantic pipe running under the trough is definitely large enough to handle the volume of water that runs through that upper level trough.

--Dave Althoff, Jr.