Top Thrill's Operational Status 04'

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Z-Man said:
Has anybody noticed the sound of a bottle clanking, right as the train rolls back a little before it launches. And if you have...what is it? I dont remember it from last year.

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That is the sound of the train settling into the launch sled.

I'm guessing the ride was closed all day Friday because of rain. I haven't heard the ride being closed all day due to mechanical problems yet this season.

Yeah, I have yet to ride it this year. Rollbacks, breaking down, and on and on. Panman theoritically the ride should have plenty of oomp. It's got a 10K HP piece of...I mean motor. I think all they needed was between 6-8K HP but they went with 10K to be safe. But yeah I would hardly call dragster being reliable this year. But yet again I doubt CP will learn, and still call Intamin for their next ride. Ya know there is B&M, and they are reliable. Hey so is Gravity Group. Oh WT isn't doing much better for reliablilty this year. Usually it's down then goes up, then goes down.

Edit: Oh I know B&M won't go that high, who cares, at least it will run. *** Edited 5/24/2004 4:15:04 AM UTC by Hooper***

Dragster was down a lot in the past week because of high winds. Sun. it was running beautifully in the morning and early afternoon until the wind got very strong. It wasn't too bad at ground level, but at the top of MF, the wind was just howling off the bay.

It seems to me that much of the down time has been due to the weather, not mechanical problems. Let's face it, how do you think it would feel riding this thing in the rain? I don't think it would feel too good. Also, in high winds it isn't very likely to make it over. Rarely has this ride been down very long due to mechanical failures. I would say that this makes the ride at least 3 or 4 times more reliable than it was last year. Anybody else remember the month and a half that it didn't run at all last year?

Just my two cents (who knows how much they're worth these days with inflation),

Damien

Would you believe that yesterday (5/23) noontime Dragster was launching trains at a regular interval, and was actually running at a higher total hourly capacity than Millennium Force?

(Of course, Magnum was moving more people than Dragster and Millennium Force combined...)

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

Define regular. Regular as in launch every minute for a half hour, or regular as in a launch every 45 seconds for 6 hours? or a mix of both? 1500 riders per hour would be the ideal, but THE REGULAR for TTD isn't that great.

Or should I say, Mantis regular or Magnum regular?:)

I was waiting for the front seat on Sunday the 23rd when it went down for wind.

It was explained by a ride op that the ride shuts itself down as soon as the wind gets up to 35 mph. They have no control once it hit's 35 mph. If it's under that they have the ability to override it.

"they have no contol once it (the wind) hits 35mph"

I HIGHLY doubt that.

MrScott

Maybe I worded that wrong.

But this is just what I was told by a ride-op. I was told that once the wind hits 35 mph the system shuts the ride down.

Carnage you are pretty much right on with your wording. As the wind approaches 35 mph we get warnings which we can override with management approval. Once it reaches 35 mph the trouble alarm goes off, meaning we can't operate the ride. As long as the wind is 35 mph we can't reset the trouble alarm. So there really isn't anything we can do (even if we wanted to). If the winds are over 35 mph, the ride won't operate, its as simple as that.

"Regular" on Sunday meant that they were sending a train every 69 seconds.

Millennium Force was dispatching on an average 4 minute interval.

Magnum was sending a train every 72 seconds.

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

Ride, did TTD have many shut downs or did it run consistent throughout the day. Also, why the 4 min intervals on MF (seems very high). Please dont tell me the new seating rules are screwing up the dispatch times that consistently.

Tom

It ran pretty much all day until the winds picked up, and it looked like it was going to rain so it went down due to weather conditions. I was waiting by the gate from 7pm to almost 8 when I gave up.

Stupid Wind!

Like Rideman said though it was running very good Sunday.

Dragster was running pretty consistently until mid-afternoon. Then it went down for a while, came back up, went down, and then I don't know if it ran again. I think it was all because of weather.

I don't know what was going on at Millennium Force. I was sitting on a bench on the midway, watching the trains pull out of the station. I understand they were doing better later in the day. I'm beginning to think (and I hate to suggest this without better evidence) that there are simply a few people on that crew who don't belong on that ride who are causing problems, because the problems seem to change with the shift...

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

Monday(5-24) it was very windy for most of the day. I noticed them testing Dragster around 5:30 or so when the wind died down. We got in line somewhere around 7:00 and waited around 1.5 hours for a ride. They were loading half trains for awhile and after many successful launches they bumped it up to 12 people per train. Other than 1 rollback early in the game, it ran great with very short intervals between launches. I think this was the fastest and most consistent I've seen it run EVER. It was also very cool of them to open it later in the day and give people the chance to ride.
The MF sign outside the line said 1.5 hours but it was only a 45 minute wait. Maybe we caught it on a good day but dispatch times weren't bad at all. I didn't actually time them but the line was really moving at a good clip and once we got in the station I didn't see any riders getting turned away as far as the seatbelt issue is concerned.

Maybe bad dispatch times are shift related, as Dave said. I rode MF twice on Sun. between 7:00 and 8:00pm, and the dispatch times were pretty good. There were trains stacked every once in a while, but there were also many times when they met interval, meaning the approaching train didn't have to wait outside.

Pete & Dave-

In talking with many friends who work as ride ops throughout the park, I think you have touched upon an important topic. Today is only May 25th and, therefore, the season is still very young. Many of the rides have crews larger than their ideal number while other areas of the park (flat ride triangles, kids' areas, etc.) are supposedly understaffed.

Give it another 2 or 3 weeks and I have a feeling that rides such as TTD, MF, Magnum, and others will all start to see their crews slimmed down. When rides are overstaffed those wishing to stay where they are must earn their spot (or at least that's how the ride ops I know make it sound). You can't really learn too much about how hard an employee will work when all you have to go on is a phone interview.

As far as reliability goes, it may well be that they can launch half-full trains every 50-odd seconds or whatever for a couple of hours. That is NOT a good definition for reliability - rather it smacks of a work-around for embedded problems in the system.

Think about it: running 6 half-full trains on TTD is about the same as running only 2 trains on Raptor or MF, in terms of actual capacity vs. theoretical capacity. None of us would accept that from CP.

The real test for "reliability" is going to be when they can launch fully loaded trains over the hill for WEEKS at a time, without more than a hiccup here and there.

CP should not accept that they are going to have to run work-arounds (like half-full trains) to get some kind of return on their 25 million dollar investment.

And if some-one can explain to me how the launch-system can be powerful enough, but still fail to send full trains over the top, I'd be grateful.

Are they running half full, right now? VERY surprised, if they are doing it because of rollbacks, because I witnessed pretty much every train making it over with ease for a couple of weeks. Although I don't know when they started running at half-full trains. I am pretty sure that it was full trains. But what other reason would they be doing running this way?