Valravn brake failure

Anyone have information about the brake failure on Valravn?

No, but I do think this was an interesting comment recently...
[url]https://pointbuzz.com/Forums/Topic/gatekeeper-valley-video-06132019#602990

Cartwright said:
...A 2 minute passing shower can come off the lake and they will take the time to take a train or two off of everything instantly. Thursday and today are perfect examples. Heck, Thursday afternoon the park was absolutely dead, but Valravn had a 60+ minute wait. Why, you ask? It was running one train because of rain. One train. On Valravn. It was a disaster.

I don't even know what the weather was like in the park today, so I have no idea what the conditions were surrounding Valravn. But I thought the comment interesting, in this new context...

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

Completely dry and sunny for Wednesday.

Someone obviously installed the brakes upside down the night before.

Hope all involved are okay and no serious injuries occurred.

Good thing it wasn’t raining. The park’s rain policy would have been set right back to 2007 when every ride with a wheel shut down if someone’s sprinklers were on across the bay and the wind was blowing in the right direction.

Someone tell the screamscape folks that magnetic brakes cannot completely stop a moving train, only to a creep at best. Friction brakes, drive wheels, Etc are utilized to completely stop a train.

No reports of injuries and for that I’m thankful. Apples to oranges but my brain immediately went back to the Smiler disaster at Alton (human error). Just terrible.

There is a twitter thread out there saying the train hit at 40mph. Pretty sure even if a train coasted through the entire end of course brake run into the station it wouldn't hit even close to 40 mph. It would hit hard, but surely not 40 mph.

As CPVet says, I am glad it wasn't raining too or we'd have easily lost the little bit of progress we have made since 2007. Although I must say it's odd - in 12 years there have now been 3 train bumps at CP.

Yikes- went on this my first time just this Sunday. I did notice at the time that coming back into the station it's a pretty steep angle down. I thought it was an odd set-up since it required so much trust in the breaks that close to a loading train...

This is the first I've heard about this. Curious if the incident occurred following some sort of other downtime and maybe there's human error involved. Doubt it would have been control systems related as the ride has been operating just fine into its fourth season. Even if there was a mechanical failure, I don't think it would affect ALL of those brakes up there. I'm doubting very much the 40 mph because there are fixed magnetic brakes up there that shouldn't really be able to fail and they slow it a bunch before the friction brakes stop it completely. I'm sure we'll probably never know the real story.

Probably not. But I do think the thread name is misleading. I think we can assume it was not a brake failure, but rather a block failure (same with Steel Vengeance last year). The brakes likely worked exactly as the relay system told it to.

I was just there this past weekend and was running smoothly. Hope everyone is okay and they fix thenissue so it doesn't happen in the future

I don't think we can assign a name to the incident without knowing more about the issue that occurred. To think it's a block programming issue after many many thousands of cycles with three trains over three plus seasons is not a leap I'd be willing to make. Quite frankly, everything I've heard from people that would know more than myself say the same about the Steel Vengeance incident. The fact that they literally changed much of the braking on the run behind the station certainly does not point to a programming issue either.

If the brakes didn't stop the train, then there is a problem with the braking system.. so I think brake failure is appropriate. The end result is brakes failed to stop the train.

https://www.news5cleveland.com/entertainment/cedar-point/cedar-points-valravn-temporarily-closed-after-trains-bump

MDOmnis said:
This is the first I've heard about this. Curious if the incident occurred following some sort of other downtime and maybe there's human error involved.

The story I heard was there was indeed a breakdown, around 20 mins, with a train stopped on the lift. When the ride restarted, the train on the lift completed the cycle, stopped on the brake run, and then proceeded forward until said bump.

From my vantage point: The quarter back was not looking and totally missed the blitz. If I had been in there I'd have chucked the ball while I was going down to avoid the loss of yards.

Any fool knows that.

Well, that and if they had just mounted those pesky wheels the right way around the braking would have been more than capable of stopping the train...

They were reading the manuals for how to install wheels properly for Valravn while working on Steel Vengeance and it suddenly valleyed.

When they went to work on Valravn they were reading the manual for Steel Vengeance and thus went to fast.

BANGO!

There is no way that human error could even cause this unless the system is partial to blame. You can press a button via control panel as many times as you want to, but when the ride isn’t ready for that specific command, it won’t happen. Or in other cases, the ride will just shutdown.

Smiler says “Hey Tee-Dub, hold my beer!”

Not saying this was the case here, but there is a manual override to make the system do things it normally wouldn’t.

But in the case of Smiler, you had a train that had valleyed on the ride course where there was no means for the computer system to detect it where it came to a rest. The computer correctly stopped the next train because the one in front of it had not passed the next checkpoint, signaling that the block behind the checkpoint was clear. Humans then manually cleared the block system as if nothing was wrong, failing to account for the train still sitting valleyed in the middle of the ride course.

Yes, there was a collision in both cases, but that's pretty much where the similarities end.

In the case of Valravn, there was a train sitting in the station, not even moving at all with huge chunks of steel straight in front of probably dozens of proximity sensors. I'm not quite sure how the system could lose track of a train sitting in the station. I don't have an explanation for what happened and we probably will never really know exactly, but I don't think it was very similar to Smiler at all (thankfully much lower speed and minus the severed limbs to be sure, but also in how it came about).