Red Train

I agree with your last statement. I honestly felt like very few crews last year really cared at all about their numbers and it showed. It was fun kicking their asses though - especially Raptor! :) Without Joe Cool and their rush in the morning, we'd have buried them. We did bury them for most of July and August. I loved getting those sheets with the numbers and seeing that we gave more rides the previous week than any other ride in the park and beat the pants off our 2003 numbers too. We increased 5.75% overall for the season - one of the few rides that did increase. I'm telling you though - something has happened at that park over the last few years. It seems like no one really cares anymore and I don't get it. The things that made the park great are slowly disappearing. Spiels, operations excellence, people smiling, budgets, etc. Hopefully that will stop this year.

As for your intervals, Magnum does list 75 seconds in the manual, but in reality, it's about 84 seconds. Trust me, I've timed it dispatch to dispatch a bunch of times and the control system doesn't let you dispatch any sooner than previous train almost at the top of the second hill. In 2001, it was 80-81 seconds. I'm pretty sure the lift got slowed down about three seconds when they installed a new lift motor this season in about late June or early July. I asked them to speed it up to the way it was, but no one in maintenance wanted to bother and no one in operations cared enough to make them bother. With an interval of 84 seconds, the max capacity, with all seats full and every interval hit is 1542. I can tell you we were slightly above or below that VERY consistently. One hour would be 1580, the next 1490 or something, but that can be attributed to taking the reading at a different time or a different number of people on the platform.

Raptor's interval is most definitely shorter than Magnum's. 75 seconds seems about right to me. But they do have four less seats. The 1536 statistic seems right on for Raptor. I would maintain that Magnum can't hit 1728 though - at least after that new lift motor. The actual max would be something like 1542. I think the reason why Magnum got higher hourly numbers is that we tried hard to fill our seats by pairing up single riders and calling for other singles to fill the seats. I worked the ride for three years and the crew this past summer did it more consistently than any other one. The 2001 crew might have had a better day here or there, but over the course of the entire summer, we just consistently ran the hell out of that ride this past year.

And Dave, I always liked it when we hit interval when you came to ride because I knew you were watching. I watched you watching! ;)

I would have to agree that the Magnum crew did an outstanding job pairing up singles this past season. There were many times I rode alone, and they would pair someone up with me and do it all without wasting any time.

Didn't really see that kind of pairing up done on any other ride last season.
*** Edited 4/15/2005 5:17:57 AM UTC by bholcomb***

MDOmnis said:
...something has happened at that park over the last few years. It seems like no one really cares anymore and I don't get it.

I agree and it's visible to guests that go every year. That said, I think John Hildebrandt really embodies everything that is good about the park, and I think he'll make a great GM. In every conversation I ever had with him when he was the marketing VP, his dedication and pursuit of the highest standards was clear. It's a top-down thing, and with him at the top, I have the utmost confidence things will go back to "normal" soon.

I could start a new topic on this, but I hate going into a packed station. (CCMR, Gemini, Magnum) TTD used a very efficient way of always have three train loads of people only in the station at once. It makes it a whole lot easier to ride the same train as the rest of your group and you don't have people constantly asking others to go in front of them. Magnum's station was total chaos last summer and it drove me away from riding it multiple times throughout the day. WT's empty station operation works okay, but it seems like a big waste of space in the station to do that.

I love the way MF works. The ride ops only let enough people into the station to fill each seat. Sure the queue line may be longer but it's still the same amount of people in line, they are just in different areas. Say you're in line for Magnum with a group of 4-6 friends, if you all want to be in the same train you have to ask a bunch of people to trade spots to organize it. On a ride like MF it's simple because since the group of 4-6 is together you just walk into the station and get into the empty lanes. It's a much more organized way to work.

I agree. MF's system is the best because the station isn't all clogged with people that leave little room to move.

I love Magnums station. I push through the people, and get a 1-3 train wait for row 3 :)

I hate the system at MF because I can't pick my seat. Sure some people don't care where they ride, some do. I understand why they do that at MF because the door to the station is in a terrible spot and things would get jammed up, but at WT, I think they should let you pick.

If you want to ride with your group on Magnum, wait until you are one or two trains away and try to organize it. Don't try to organize it when you are 10 trains back because chances are there's going to be something to mess you up - like single riders or a broken seat. But for goodness sake, if you're at the front of the line and you're not going to get on the train, let someone else who is going to get on in front of you! ;)

If you want to cut through the crowd in the station, go for the second or third row of the train. The people lining up for the front hide those rows. It can get cluttered up there, but we pumped through more riders when there were people up there to fill the seats. It makes a difference of probably at least 50-100 people per hour and thousands of rides each week.

I just wish they would put back the angled railings for the first car on Magnum. When they straightened the rails out (because it was simpler to fabricate when they built the new gate-compatible rails) and dramatically shortened the front-seat chute, they turned the front of that station from 'mostly chaotic' to 'utterly chaotic'.

Quite simply, the Magnum station refits were all poorly planned and poorly executed, in my opinion. It's sheer hard work by the crew that makes it work at all. They took a decade of operational experience and completely ignored it when adapting the ride to the new standards. It would have been easy to do it right, but doing it right would mean not doing it "right". :(

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

Totally agree with you on both counts. You really could probably go as far as saying the station, with the jagged front wall, was a poor design from the beginning. In fact I heard Monty Jasper and some guy with the title of "Logistics Supervisor" muttering such a thing last year when they came up to check things out. Not that some of the stations designed under Monty's watch (Mantis and MF come to mind) are very good from an operational standpoint either. The modifications they did in '02 mad a poor situation worse. It's not uncommon for the crew to have to yell back to people to get some riders to "come on down" to rows two and three because they are completely empty! :) That doesn't even get into the awful placement of the co-dispatch button. It's what happens when management looks at something for five minutes without really thinking things out and says, "this is how we're going to do it."

There's been some talk about doing something with the pillars on the unload side of the station - either making them smaller or illiminating them if possible to improve the visibility. Not sure exactly how they'd could eliminate them without completely removing the little "roof" over the train.

On a side note, and this probably deserves it's own thread, I have been hearing some rumors (and the language in the rider safety guide seems to support it although I don't remember the wording last year to confirm) that another rather rash decision has been made that will influence many rides (and locker usage) this year. If you can't figure out what I'm talking about, think about the change they made to Magnum in about August last season and apply it across the board to every ride. Probably makes good sense when it comes right down to it, but it sure is going to piss a lot of people off.

What change did they do to Magnum. I dont remember anything changing?

They didn't allow loose articles.

MDOmnis said:
I hate the system at MF because I can't pick my seat. Sure some people don't care where they ride, some do. I understand why they do that at MF because the door to the station is in a terrible spot and things would get jammed up, but at WT, I think they should let you pick.

I've never had a problem with that. Every time I ride MF or WT I just tell the ride op which seat I want and he/she says "Okay" and lets us in and we wait back for a minute, then he/she lets more people in, fills the train, and then once the train leaves and all of the slots are empty (except the front of course) we go into the one we want.

They did the exact same thing for me and my friend when we wanted to ride in the last row.
Which by the way was awsome.

I've never had any problem at MF getting the seat I want to ride in. If the seat you want is taken, jjust get into the line for the front seat. Once the train loads and the chutes empty out, I "change my mind" about waiting for the front seat and join the row I want. Simple enough. Easier than the overcrowded craziness at Magnum.

If the rumor about the loose articles turns out to be true, then I say, thank god! It's about time somebody made things consistant across the board. Sure there are going to be some angry folks out there at first, but in the long run I think that it will make the loose article policy easier to inforce and easier for the guest to understand.

If they eliminate loose articles at all of the rides and make things consistant, there will be no more complaints like..."But I left my bag on Raptors platform!" and "Why can't I just use the shelves in the station?" or "But I took it on all the other rides!"

Instead you will hear complaints like..."That's stupid!" and "But we did it last year!" or " They just want us to spend more money on lockers!".

People will not be happy about the new "rumored" policy, but at least they will learn at the beginning of their day that loose items are better left in a locker, in the car, or with a non-rider.

Until they get "free" lockers like those found at Universal, people will view it as a ploy to make more money and not as a safety issue that's in the best interest of guests. I personally never bring anything in Cedar Point anymore, but I can't tell you how much more fun I had at Universal being able to bring in my "big" camera and stash it into a locker for the big rides.

Universal has one of the best systems when it comes to lockers(the finger print scan kills me)I guess they need to do something good for you seeing how a one day ticket is about 60 dollars.

The fingerprint scans still make me uneasy.

The lockers still rock, though.

I think the lockers on Magnum are a great idea. It'll be nice being not having to dodge cell phones and water bottles falling from the sky while guarding the pools in Soak City.

The front car(and maybe others) of the red train is in front of the tree. http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v175/Dragster420/cam2_00001.jpg

Maybe they havent been testing because they've been waiting to put the red train on. So if the red train is on tommorrow or sometime later on in the new week, we can expect testing to start.......hopefully. *** Edited 4/21/2005 12:17:48 AM UTC by TTD 120mph***