trim brakes

I'll go ahead and ask my stupid question. Why are trim brakes on sometimes and off at others? Why not full speed all the time? As you can tell I am no engineer, I just want to go as fast as the ride is supposed to go.

Many variables. Sometimes the ride structure can't handle the stress, sometimes the trains can't handle the stress. It all depends on the ride. Usually the trims are there as preventative maintenance. Sometimes they are there to protect the riders. (think Arrow)

If you are lucky enough to get a trimless ride on a coaster that normally has trims on, it is usually because the trains are running slower. Either because it is cold weather, windy, or fewer riders than usual..

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Richie Anderson
Millennuim Force TL '01
Ride Maintenance '02 & '03

The only real reason is to space out the trains to hit interval. It rarely has anything to do with anything else, with the exception of Mean Streak's first drop.

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Jeff - Webmaster - GTTP - My Blog
Blogs, photo albums - CampusFish
What time does the water show start?

Is this the Joeseph White that is a professor at CWRU? If it is, I didn't know you were a coaster fan. If not, my apologies.

-Sam (your favorite student;))

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Avalanche Run - My first Roller Coaster.
Magnum XL-200 - The BEST Roller Coaster!

Jeff, there are plenty of coasters at CP and several other parks that have trims for more than spacing the trains. I doubt that the trims before Gemini's helix are there to help interval. The same with the trims on Mine Ride before the second lift and Corkscrew before the lift. I'm not sure about Mantis, but since they are only running one train at the moment and are still using the drop trims, I doubt that it has anything to do with spacing.

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Richie Anderson
Millennuim Force TL '01
Ride Maintenance '02 & '03

ONE train on Mantis?!?!? If that ride didn't take forever to get on before, I can about imagine it now...

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What IS the air-speed velocity of an African swallow?

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Jeff said:
The only real reason is to space out the trains to hit interval. It rarely has anything to do with anything else, with the exception of Mean Streak's first drop.

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Jeff - Webmaster - GTTP - My Blog
Blogs, photo albums - CampusFish
What time does the water show start?

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I don't understand. Why trim brakes on the first drop, was this an afterthought, an add on because of miscalculations? I also noticed brakes on the Mantis drop before the loop.

Mantis does only run one train at a time. I think he meant that only one train is on the course at one time. One going through the course and the other going up the lift hill or loading. I've never really remember seeing two trains running the course at once. At least not since they took off the third train.

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WELCOME TO THE 2004 SEASON!

Cedar Point, Absolutly Amazing!!

Right now there is only one operating train on Mantis. The second one only has 5 of its cars on the transfer tracks, and the third train is still shrink-wraped under the transfers.

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-Chris Woodard
Friday, September 18th, 2003 at 10:10 PM. It finally happened. Rollback on Dragster in the front seat of the gold train!
-2004 Screamster

No, as of yesterday, there is only one train being run on Mantis. On Monday, when just about everything but TTD and MF were walk-ons, Mantis was somewhere between 45 minutes to an hour, consistently. Perhaps maybe a half hour at times, but I'd say that if TTD would have been running consistently, Mantis would have been the longest wait in the park.

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Jeff Young

Joe White,

The trims on MS's first drop are to keep the ride from higher maintenance. Without those trims the ride was damaging itself (or so has been said and I doubt Cedar Point would lie about this).

It amazes me that CP has multiple Maintenance (something like 6) People that keep MS running "smoothly".

That's a lot of labor costs to keep this ride in safe operation and that's not including ANY of the Ride Ops and others that bring this ride to life each year.

MrScott

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"I gave them to the Klingons, Captain..."
*** This post was edited by MrScott 5/11/2004 6:14:40 PM ***

I understand why these brakes are needed sometimes, but I also think that they can take away from the ride experiance. A great example is the trim on Magnum, if it is too tight. I love the rare trimless rides on Magnum, as the Gs are much better on the turnaround and the airtime seems better on the bunny hops.

If it is an issue of timing, I think they can speed up the lift, or do other things, to make the brakes unessesary. If it is an issue of G-forces, I think some people are just wimps.

Anyway, there was my rant about trims. A nessesary evil, whose nessesity I doubt in certain situations.

-Sam

well there are two sets of brakes, trim and safety. the trims do just that, trim the train so that it is traveling at the speed it needs to. as for the safety brakes, they are there just in case a train is being occupied in the track ahead. sometimes the safety brakes are used as trims, example the midway point on ms, sometimes they slow a train down, sometimes not. even on magnum out of the last tunnel, even on gemini on the last turn around (not that they would use them anymore, since they don't use the third set of trains)

so if the trims are used, it could be because they don't want to hurt the ride or the riders by going to fast into a turn.

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Avalanche Sam said:
I love the rare trimless rides on Magnum, as the Gs are much better on the turnaround and the airtime seems better on the bunny hops.

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but i do agree with you Sam, trimless rides on Magnum are very cool

I just want to know if the MCBR (Mid-Course Brake Run) has been on for Raptor? Last year it was off and Raptor was great. Thanks in advance.

Yes the MCBR was off the day I was there (Sunday) and the ride was great. Also on that day I found MS's drop's brake to be off, along with Mantis' trim on the first drop, I caught a ride on Maggie without the brakes before the turn around and also Gemini. It got rather windy at some points during the day. I was told by an op that wind has a lot to do with whether or not they open the brakes. Is this true?

Ride Magnum on a windy day, in an empty train, with the trims on and see if you make it back.

Well I suppose if the train was truly empty, you wouldn't be making it back. ;)

Raptor was not trimless... its brakes made a little touch. They appear to do the same this year.

1. didn't Raptor get it's trim breaks out this off season??

2. I emailed CP saying get rid of the trims on the top hill of MS and replace the spots with metal supports.

I'm sure they'll get right on your expert engineering "breaking" advice.