Gatekeeper- terrible stacking

Back to the wheel... Vegas has a new ferris wheel where each cabin contains eight flat screen TV's and an iPad dock. They were busy building it when I was there back in January 2014. (source)

I was told each cabin would also contain a bar, but I haven't been able to confirm that.

The giant wheel at CP has precisely 0 flat screen TV's and I'm pretty sure it's illegal to pull out your cell phone while you're on it. Also... No bar... :(

Forget IROC... Let's all complain to park operations about the lack of TV's, booze, and iPod docks.

(Sarcasm)

I don't work at the park anymore. I have a full time, big girl job working for Disney. :)

The interesting thing about this is that "back in the day" I remember how frustrating it was to watch the operations at Kings Island, where their standard practice was not to even open the shotgun boarding gates until the last exiting rider left the platform.

Meanwhile at Cedar Point, none of the coasters even had gates on the shotgun. Those are a relatively new development. Cedar Point also operated their coasters with shorter headway between trains, with blocking rules based on an assumption that once a train leaves it isn't coming back. So as soon as a train was out of the station, the next train could be brought in for loading. Because of the position of the brake calipers in the station, it was common on Gemini for a pair of trains to be entering the station at high speed under manual control before the departing trains had completely left the building (although it had completely cleared the brake calipers). When Cedar Point added boarding gates, they did so in such a way that the gates open automatically along with the lap bars in the train so as to minimize the impact of the gates on the speed of train loading. In fact, it's possible that the gates may have sped up one of the processes slightly, by giving oncoming riders a cue that it is time to enter the train.

I still don't understand why the park that practically invented the entire discipline of ride operations would go to an outside source for any kind of operational process development. I can see them implementing an outside training program, but based on their own operating policies and procedures, rooted in *decades* of operational expertise. What's the opposite of "not invented here"?

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

RideMan said:

I still don't understand why the park that practically invented the entire discipline of ride operations would go to an outside source for any kind of operational process development. I can see them implementing an outside training program, but based on their own operating policies and procedures, rooted in *decades* of operational expertise. What's the opposite of "not invented here"?

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

That's the thing that I don't get either. IROC is used at a bunch of other parks, the largest comparable chain being Six Flags.

I'm just going to stop myself there.

And we all know what a "good" reputation Six Flags has in operations.