Miles on coaster trains

Does the park keep track of how many miles are each coaster train? Or is it calculated differently? I am interested in how many miles are on the trains since the rides first opened

I doubt that "miles" is what they keep track of, but it might be interesting to find out. But I'll leave that to someone else, because.... math.

Sometimes parks say things like "We have X miles of track at our park!" But that's not what you're looking for.

Seasons, days, laps, things like that are probably more likely. If anyone at all is keeping track of such things.

Cycles, I would imagine.

I guess the best way to find this out is to first find out how many laps said coaster train has done up till this current point in time. Times that by length of track. Then take that and convert to miles. Could be an interesting thing because once that is found out you can say well "this train as run as song as it could have lapped the earth __ times"

Most of the coasters track their trains by run times. That way we can factor in downtime accurately. A coaster like Dragster may rotate trains several times in a day for various reasons.

To calculate it, we take the time that the coaster is open for the day, subtract any downtime that the whole ride was down- all the trains will share this. Then we subtract any time individual trains are not operating.

While we do not directly track the miles of the trains, it wouldn't be hard to get a close estimate. We would just have to divide the number of cycles (which we do track) by the number of trains running that hour and then multiply by the track length.

Interesting

It's a pretty neat thing to think about now that you mention it Paul. While I don't know the numbers, one can assume that most of the coasters have at least been to the moon and back in terms of total miles.

That's more than likely an understatement.

yeah I thought it was interesting considering most of the coasters still have their original trains

This is Probably not something the park actively wants to advertise or promote: Our Corkscrew trains have been to the moon & back 'X' times, then some accident happens and it could be a media circus. It's a headline waiting to happen.

It would be really cool if they put odometers on the front row.

Disaster Transport made it to Alaska.

Paul Florio said:

you can say well "this train as run as song as it could have lapped the earth __ times"

I do not understand "as run as song"??

Chris

I'm guessing it's a typo and should say "has run as long"

I never really thought about it in terms of miles, but a Magnum train when I worked there would do about 174 miles in one 10AM-10PM day (about 180 dispatches).

We always kept track of running hours for each train and tried to keep them about even throughout the season. Back then, we didn't transfer one off that often, but when we did, we would try to pick the one with the most hours unless there was a problem with one, then we'd pick that one to transfer off.

I think newer rides (and maybe even Magnum with the new control system) might count the number of dispatches, but I doubt they track dispatches by train.

I don't know why newer ride control systems wouldn't track cycles for each train, given how trivial it would be to do so.

Thabto said:

I'm guessing it's a typo and should say "has run as long"

Bingo, sorry

MDOmnis said:

I never really thought about it in terms of miles, but a Magnum train when I worked there would do about 174 miles in one 10AM-10PM day (about 180 dispatches).

That's a decent amount, if that one train ran 7 days a week that's about 1230 miles

djDaemon said:
I don't know why newer ride control systems wouldn't track cycles for each train, given how trivial it would be to do so.

Every ride keeps track of cycle counts. For older rides, Ride ops have cycle tracking sheets or use a separate hand counter to keep track every hour. For newer rides, the control panel keeps track of the cycles per hour. It is then recorded on the Daily Operations Report.

But does the control system track cycles for each unique train? It seems like that would be easy enough to do via RFID or something.

At Cedar Point, no.

I know Disney does, or at least one of the attractions I got a backstage tour of did. And this was 5 or 6 years ago now. Used RFID to log cycles and hours to automatically tell maintenance when certain preventative procedures needed to be completed. And it would not let a given unit run until that procedure was completed. It was really neat to see. At any given time the computer would tell you the maintenance status was of any of the dozens of vehicles for that attraction.

I imagine the manual/handwritten approach is "good enough" at CP to accomplish what they need. Especially considering the major rides only have a few trains to track. At least when compared to the volume of a Disney operation.