Opening Day Maintenance Issues

It wouldn't be Opening Weekend without a whole bunch of seats roped off on Magnum.

Speaking of Magnum, did anybody else notice that they fixed the outside wall of the first tunnel? It doesn't BANG! anymore as the train goes through! Or that they added safety brackets to the drive wheels on Raptor?

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

TTD had issues on Sunday clearing the hill.
Maverick was breaking down all the time on Saturday / Sunday.

Skyhawk supposedly was down, but we didn't see it personally, and Maxair still being down. Yeah there were a few problems going on it seemed.

I also think that CP should have a season pass holder soft opening. They should also do some landscaping before the park opens up. Lots of work to be done stilll.and you would figure if this park is closing in just a few months for the winter...why would you have even one day where your park is not in top shape.

http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y42/kicker15L7/DSC03299.jpg
Skyhawk did get new seat belts though if we didn't notice this already....

All I can say is that it was ebarrasing! I brought friends who paid for their tickets and they had a terrible time. While it was a bit annoying with all of the seatbelt issues, I understand that there will be some down time on rides on opening day, there is no excuse for trians to be loading only 2/3 with brand new seat belts. I have a season pass, therefore, it is no problem for me to go back another day when everything is working. But, how do you tell your friends who spent over 40 dollars to get into the park that it's normal on opening day. Something has to be done! My fiance and I went to challenge park on Friday night and had to wait as the ride ops on the go carts went through the cars to see which were working and which needed to be sent to maintenance. (Unfortunatly, those were the exact words of the ride op)

I honestly don't know what was worse...1. That the rides weren't ready to run with full loads or that the employees at Happy Friar didn't know how to use a register. Perhaps, I should have waited another two weeks until the park was operating properly to make my first visit.

factory - they don't do the majority of landscaping until later in May, and the reason being late frost. Heck, up here in Hudsonville we had a frost Wednesday or Thursday last week (I don't remember which). Everything will be planted and growing by Memorial Day.

Magnum was also down in the morning, and about 5 seats on every train were taped off. Wicked Twister was down in the morning as well.

But, at least TTD was running well all day yesterday!

Just how many mechanics do they have on staff now? When

I worked there in the mid 1970's there were a little over

twenty on staff by mid season, four electricians, fifteen

carpenters, four sound techs, and four animation techs.

It has been alluded to me that there is no where near that

level of staffing now, with a lot more iron to take care

of now.

Dave - I didn't notice that until half way through Sunday and thought to myself, "hey, that banging is gone"

I was also very surprised by the opening day mechanical issues. I did laugh though while waiting for Raptor when it went down mid-day because it took FIVE maintenance men and a manager to fix a simple drive wheel issue. They literally stood in a circle around one wheel on the transfer track and stared at it for about 20 minutes. Then, one of them finally got up on a ladder with a wrench and tightened the bolt. That must have fixed the issue because the trains immediately started to cycle empty afterwards. It just amazes me how things work in the park.

In response to someone's comment earlier, the drive wheels on Raptor have had safety locks on them since one fell off in the middle of operation on opening day in 2005. That was a fun day on platform :)

At all gates or which one(s) in particular?

I was at Raptor and it broke in the early evening while I was on the platform. The ride host ran up the hill to talk on the phone, then came back down to talk on the phone at the bottom too. Then they sent empty trains for a while. Soon, we got on it.

Now I know having some seats being taped off is annoying. I was there opening day and got annoyed myself (Correct me if I'm wrong) I think that the higher up you go the cooler the air is. And if the train is too heavy in the cooler air the train won't run right and you might risk it being stuck on the track. (once again i could be wrong on this....)

I also believe they were having problems with some of the new seatbelts. Every year there will be something that all annoys us and in a years time we will be complaining about the new annoyances and won't even remember this years. I for one despite not being able to ride Maverick and MaXair on Saturday still had a blast. The weather was amazing and the park wasn't "extremely" crowded like it is in July. I would call my first Opening Day experience a success, but that's just my personal opinion and experience from Saturday. I hope everyone enjoys his or her season at Cedar Point this year. :-)

I definitely agree. I made the most of it on Saturday, and the weather was certainly beautiful, but there were a lot of major issues. Maverick consumed about an hour and a half of our time, and after seeing it roll back after the tunnel launch we finally gave up. I was also curious about the maintenance team.. I wonder how many maintenance personnel were working that day, because while all of these problems were happening, we saw 5 of them working on the top of the chainlift on Wildcat. Now don't get me wrong, Wildcat is a good ride. But it seems like they would want as many of them as they could get on the higher capacity and more crowd-drawing attractions.

^^ - actually, more mass increases the inertia of the train and reduces the chances of it getting stuck somewhere on the track.

By the end of today, a lot of the opening day issues were beginning to be ironed out. However, Raptor and Maverick still had a lot of problems today. Yesterday Skyhawk kept going down because of a pesky problem with the lapbars not showing as locked properly.

Of any ride, Maverick had the most problems this weekend by far.

As much as I love using my season pass, I never go in May due to ride maintenance issues, lack of experienced operators and the limited numbers of trains running on rides due to fewer customers. I usually start going in the middle of June. I figure I might as well wait until the weather is nicer to end up standing in lines that might actually be faster in a lot of cases.

I did not want to open a new topic up for this but I have a small question. I see on the web cam that Dragster has no trains on the transfer tracks. Are they running all 6 now? I know it was talked about that it is best to run with 5 and have a ghost train but I was just wondering since I can't see one on the transfer track like always unless they only put 5 on this year. Does anyone know?

There are only 5 on the track, and none on transfer as of this weekend. Purple train was the one that was missing.

Yup, I wonder what they did with purple train. Perhaps that one was left in storage or is still being worked on. Anyone know?

Let me guide you to the purple train.

Today was not a great day for rides. When I got to the park around 11 Maverick, Wicked Twister and Dragster were down. Wicked Twister opened first some time around noon. Maverick had run in the morning for ERT but then went down around 10. She opened up around 5 and ran the rest of the night. Dragster started running somewhere around 6:30 and ran the rest of the night. Sky Ride was down around 5 and there were maintenance workers on the platform, never saw it run again. Chaos had a problem in the afternoon because a bolt fell off from somewhere, but opened shortly after. We got on no problem but the ride stopped in the air and they had to manually lower us to the ground, and the ride closed again. Skyhawk was down from around 5-close.

While I had a great day at the park, it gets annoying when you can't find something to ride because so many things are not open. I've never experienced that at CP before and I hope to never have to again. One good thing though is that the new ride crews were doing great. The Millennium crew didn't stack any trains for more than 10 or 20 seconds while I was in line, Raptor's crew was great, Magnum's crew was great, Maverick's crew was great, and Mantis' crew was really good.

With regards to the new seatbelts on Mean Streak, they're a great improvement to the ride, now if only they all worked. With 3 trains running, we waited an hour to ride. I would say 30-40% of the seats were closed off because of seatbelt problems. If you're going to buy new seatbelts for a ride, make sure they all work before installing them. One other thing I noticed was right near the entrance to Mean Streak there was in plain view a board on the ride where one end had become loose and was hanging there. Maybe it had just happened in the morning, but that's not a really great thing to have guests see before riding.