Opening Day Maintenance Issues

I hope that this is bad luck and not a sign of things to come, but there was an abnormal number of break downs and ride closures on opening day this year. As discussed on another forum Maxair is still not open. Maverick was pretty much down since 4:00 and did not open for the night, Wildcat shut down early, Raptor and Skyhawk seemed to be having issues (Skyhawk broke down on the last ride of the night), and half the seats on Blue Streak were roped off with orange tape. I have never seen anything like this especcially on opening day with established rides.

On a somewhat related note the main midway merry go round did not look like it had any paint touch up on it. Hopefully this is just bad luck for CP and not a sign of maintenence cut-backs. The cut-backs in parking staff were quite obvious as it appears that people parked wherever they wanted to.

hopefully they'll work out the "bugs" after a couple of days.

This is what usually happens on opening day. Besides the rides mention everything else was running pretty well, especially TTD.

I have been going to opening day for over ten years now, and you can expect the new rides to have bugs, but the older rides normally do not have problems. Ussually major issues are addressed over the off-season. So that explains why Maverick was down. I just think the shut down times for the other rides were longer than ussual. Maybe there isa lot of new maintenence personel this year.

By the way I was pleased by the way that Top Thrill Dragster and Wicked Twister were running. Maybe the bugs have finally been worked out for these rides.

I've been a life long fan of the point. I've never been to opening day before (since I moved from living in Cleveland nearly 20 years ago), but I was very unimpressed! Here are my observations from yesterday in no particular order.

- Speakers at front gate (inside) blown (can't hear music or national anthem)

- Blue Streak both trains had 5 seats "orange taped" including 1 train with 1 seat in the first row.

- TTD many seats "orange taped" for non usage. Initial trains before noon departed with only 6 passengers. 1 pair of rollback magnets stuck in the up position all day.

- M.F. had water dummies still in the seats upon arrival at 9:20am. This wasted over 15 minutes of precious "platinum ride time." At least Millie ran well, but needs paint. Didn't notice any 08 bolt inspection labels. Didn't they inspect the ride this off season?

- Maverick showed very little passenger run time and was closed for most of the day.

- Many urinals in the most men's room unavailable "plastic bagged"

At Cedar Point it used to be about the guest experience. Many other issues I personally witnessed, but not detailed here. My question is, what have they been doing since they closed for the season 7 months ago. The first day the park should be at its peak and looking it's best. The public hasn't had a chance to break things yet, so these must be left issues from last season. Are these typical opening day observations, or is this a bad sign of things to come this season??? I hope not. If so this could be a bad season. Maybe Cedar Fair is stretched too thin.

maby they are too concerned with other parks to concentrate on thir flagship park

According to ride ops on Blue Streak, they were having numerous problems with the retractable seat belts, which is why so many of the seats were taped off. I had trouble getting my own belt to to come out from the 'retracted' position to use it, but finally managed to coax it out.

I wonder if the shorter and shorter off-season is taking its toll. Plus, I heard there was some arbitrary mandate that they couldn't even start firing up rides until two weeks prior to opening, in the interest of limiting energy costs. Take that for what it's worth... I don't know if it's true.

You know, the speaker thing is something that has bothered me for a long time. There are countless instances around the park where amplification is done wrong. Speakers are being driven too hard to the point of distortion, cheap microphones are used and operators are not trained how to use them. I would say that probably 75% of the times that you encounter amplified sound, it's distorted, and 50% of the time you can't even hear what is being said.

Seems like we had a streak of bad luck yesterday with the Raptor going down for maintence issues in the middle of the day, but it was brought up after about 15 minutes, we waited about an hour and a half in line.

We headed over to Chaos and that ride stopped during the course of the ride and we all had to get off.

Overall though we had a great time, however, I don't remember last year on opening day being as busy as it was. Subway was a bit pricy though for half a sub.

I agree with Jeff's assertion that the shorter off-seasons are contributing to the lack of readiness on opening day. The park just wasn't ready to open yesterday. Perhaps this is why the park just can't open in April. They have a hard enough time opening in May. Among the other maintenance issues not already noted, Magnum, though running all three trains, had entire cars roped off, not to mention the individual rows and seats also that had orange tape over them. Game Day Grille had a sign outside of it that informed everyone that it was "cash only" for the day. While in there they were still trying to get they're internet connection established. Again, just didn't seem to be ready.
Was it the worst opening day I've been to, maintenance wise, in the last eight years? Probably. Did it prohibit me from having a great day? Not at all.

I had a lot of similar issues too yesterday.

First off when I wanted to leave to put my coat in my car I stood at the gate for 5 minutes before I could exit because no one knew where the handstamps were.

Skyhawk shut down right after I got in line.

Maverick broke after waiting 1 1/2 hours in line.

Blue Streak and Demon Drop were down earlier in the day when I went to ride them. Then after seeing both running Demon Drop was only testing and the ride ops said they were not going to open anytime soon. So I went over to Blue Streak to it shutting down right as I got into the station.

Magnum, Gemini, Blue Streak all had way too many seats taped off.

Power Tower only had one side of the drop tower running all day with a huge line on that side.

Wildcat had some lift hill problem most of the day.

Then there is always maXair...

Foods was as slow as I expected, but after all these years I do not have any expectations for them.

Aside from the many maintence issues I was impressed with the overall friendliness of the staff and turnaround times in the stations. The rides that were up and running seemed to be running a little better then usual. I enjoyed rides that I normally do not(Mantis).

When my daughter was on Froghopper, the control mechanism was apparently balky. The op tried to get the ride to lift; it would rise about two feet, then drop again. He had to repeat this five or six times before it would work properly.

Then when she was on Waveswingers, the ride op had the same problem. In this instance, she couldn't get it to restart at all and had to shut down the ride completely.

Makes me wonder if there has been any reduction in the maintenance budget. It's sheer speculation, but still . . .

A lot of the issues I saw were related to the fact that while rides have been running, they have not been running *with people on them*. A water bottle isn't going to complain about a lap bar that doesn't latch properly, and a water bottle isn't going to cycle the seat belt every time it comes through the station. By the time I waited 45 minutes to ride Blue Streak, they had at least 8 seats on each train roped off for stuck seat belts. As a side note, when I rode, I was probing the whole retractor mechanism in search of the "magic button" that releases the retractor and I couldn't find it. Exposing that to the crew members would make a big difference in making the retractable belts usable, as would adjusting the release position on the retractor. As they were yesterday, the retractable belts were a disaster.

It seems to me that a lot of issues across the park might have been easier to deal with had half the maintenance staff not been charged with going back repeatedly to Wildcat to reset the ride's lift chain. I saw the lift chain off of the top sprocket no less than four times over the course of the day.

Even without retractors, there were seat belt issues all over the park. On Wave Swinger, for instance, the belts are really long this year. But on Gemini, now the belts are so short that two adults can barely get them to fasten. Again, it is something that would have been obvious if they had tried to put actual people into the seats before opening day.

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

Just a side note Maverick did reopen for about two trains at 9:30 (I was on the second) and even with these they were having problems, the lead factor I think was the proxies decided to act up because trains in the tunnel were getting half way up, and then you would have trains in brake positions 1, 3, 4, and the one in 3 would not move to 2. Then when my train came in off the course we had to walk off the ride, although we did get to ride, and we got walk on dragster so that was ok.

EdZ - TTD almost always (at least in the cooler months when I'm there) starts off with half trains to eliminate roll-backs. There isn't much way around this.

One big thing I noticed when I rode Corkscrew in the morning, the ops were still buckling empty seats. Also, some belts seemed to be short. I got on Raptor of all rides and had a hard time getting the belt in place.

I was able to ride Millennium for the first time in a couple years though.

Maverick being down wasn't too much of a surprise, it seems that the Intamin coasters take a couple years at a minimum to get up to the maximum reliability. I don't know if that's the sign of poor craftsmanship, or cutting edge technology.

And I agree with Dave, running through a few trains with water dummies does not fully test the ride, especially those parts of the ride that involve rider interaction.

Overall I think yesterday went pretty well, just wish the rain would have held off until afternoon today. Could have gotten in a few more rides before leaving for home.

I'm sorry, but what can I say... Yesterday was a disaster. Sure, I had a great day, but I didn't even get one ride on Maverick. Alas....

They should test everything for several weeks and cycle people through all seats before opening, to be honest.

What caused the trouble with Magnum's trains? That's all I saw taped off.

Top Thrill Dragster performed exceptionally well. I'd have to say about 10,000 people went thru the turnstiles yesterday. The ride was much better than I remembered. :)

I was at some of the rides that had downtime issues.......

Maverick- Bart train was stuck in the tunnel and wouldn't launch, then bart also got stuck and had a rollback on the hill. I was in the station because I did early entry for maverick.

Skyhawk- It was down in the morning then I was walking by it and it was testing. So we ran to form a line for it and saw they had maintenance fixing the lapbar mechanical parts and they test ran it about 20 times before we got on. Basically, we were the first 2008 guest riders for skyhawk!

Wicked twister- It was down in the morning, but we rode it and it was working fine with a 1/2 hour line.

All of the above reasons are why I'm still an advocate for a City of Sandusky (or Erie County) day where they would offer reduced or free admission and let them work the bugs out on a crowd that didn't pay full price to be there prior to the real opening day.

Also in the morning the ticket system was not reading any regular day tickets. My friend had to wait 5 mintues to get in the park. Which held up the entire line behind him. What ticked me off was Dick Kinzel and Bill Spehn were very near and no one went over there and asked them if the people could enter.

i heard that the pictures for the season passes werent allways working either.