A.J.

Even if the queue is less than half full, expect to wait 25 to 30 minutes at the least.

I dunno - this may be unintentional but when the lap restraint pops open at the end of the ride I have the ability to move myself back in the seat a little bit. I think it's because I sit forward in the station so I can reach the overhead bar to pull down and just forget to sit back. I'm a really tiny guy with a lot of leg muscle but the only time I've ever been super-uncomfortable in the seat was while sitting on the holding brake before they started letting the restraints release a little bit.

Same. All I can find with some quick searching was this snippet from an article on RideAccidents.com, talking about Superman the Escape and Xcelerator - http://www.rideaccidents.com/2004.html#jun1b I always wondered why this happened, and now I know - photo of Darien Lake's Ride of Steel...

Yeah, my favorite thing to do is legs out, hands up on all the hills. It is seriously one (err...four?) of the best things ever.

That makes more sense then, it would also explain why Bizarro switched to U-shape bars. While I do think that it's a bonkers reactive move to straight-up ban that design, there are plenty of other designs that are just as comfortable and also just as safe to use (like the aforementioned Bizarro). If you think that this sort of thing is leading to "the death of the lap bar" or whatever I think you're mistaken.

"The General Public doesn't like this ride"? Seriously? If the guests dislike Skyrush so much - why is it, then, that the ride always has a queue that's at least one-half full during the day? I would argue that it's the most popular coaster in the park.

Seriously? This is a thread? There are plenty of attractions across both states that use T-bars, such as Nitro at Six Flags Great Adventure and Pandemonium to name a couple popular ones. I really don't see any states "banning" that kind of lap restraint as there are plenty of new rides offered by manufacturers that use T-bars by design (like Great Coasters coasters, for example).

Curious - it doesn't LOOK like any changes were made, perhaps the shoulder harness unlocked more easily to make loading and unloading faster?

Oooh, dear. I won't know if I can make the Knoebels event until this Saturday... Hopefully there will still be a ticket left!

I really like Hydra. The jojo roll is wicked fun, the entire coaster just glides through the layout and there's a fun airtime hill too!

More screenshots please.

All of the queues in the park move at reasonable speeds based on two-train operation with the exception of Fahrenheit which is dreadfully low-capacity. I would consider tackling the coasters at the front of the park (Skyrush, Comet, Great Bear, Sooperdooperlooper) during your preview period and then trying out the coasters in the back of the park the following morning. Of course, this is all dependent on the competence of the operators. What should have been a ten-minute wait for Lightning Racer turned into a twenty-minute wait for me thanks to super-slow operations with only one train per side...

I'm still sticking with my guns in saying that we may see Midway America (Whip, Music Express, the Ferris Wheel and Lightning Racer included) be "relocated" to the new park expansion when they start developing it. I know it's a big operation to relocate a permanently-installed wooden coaster (let alone two) but I don't think that it's impossible... Also, as sympathetic as I am toward Wildcat and as much as I enjoy it in certain rows of the train, I wouldn't expect it to make the trip if they did something like that. But speculation is speculation!

Considering that this is a straight-up press release and not some convoluted stealth marketing campaign that has everyone guessing for months, I would say that this new attraction probably isn't a roller coaster.

They're nearly the same as the restraints found on most Intamin coasters made in the past decade - an overhead lap bar with an attached shoulder harness secured by a seat belt - though Inferno has a vest harness instead. In order for the restraint to open all the way and eject someone, the belt would either have to be deliberately unbuckled or snapped in half.

Holy seriously tall footers, Batman!

Well, it was completely an accident then. I don't see why this particular issue would prevent Ninja from re-opening (unless there was significant damage to the train), as the restraint systems totally worked as designed and no one was gravely injured or ejected.

Really the best way to get rid of huge line jumping (in my opinion) is to get rid of switchbacks. If you have one pathway that only appears to go forward and does not appear to interact with itself in any other way, people won't think, "there's a faster way to get there" because there's only one way to go.

I thought I read somewhere that some of the trap door slides actually give you a foam board thingie to put on your back as you slide down. Unfortunately I have to wear a shirt when I go swimming, so it looks like no super-fast Snake Pit slides for me.

That looks fun. Nothing super-crazy, just a good old-fashioned wooden coaster.

I don't believe this for even a fraction of a second.

They still have a bunch of projects in the works, right? I'm sure the now-former staff have been training and preparing the others to step up and take over for a while now.

Interesting day at the park yesterday... As part of my thesis project this year I completely relied on the Hersheypark smartphone app to get around. It was super-useful as a map and for information about shows, but for rides it was almost completely useless. Wait times were grossly inaccurate across the board. Most of the time this actually ended up being a good thing - Skyrush, Fahrenheit and Great Bear all had 45-minute waits on the app but I ended up waiting for just under 30 minutes each - but it was still inaccurate. Even after those half-hour waits, the app still said 45-minutes. The wait times do update but they need to do it more frequently. Also - there are some rides where Hersheypark seriously needs to get its operations together. The Hollow crews, Great Bear's crew and Fahrenheit's crew were good enough. But Lightning Racer's crew, at least around noon, was absolutely terrible with various practices leading to five-minute dispatches, along with one-train operation taking me almost twenty minutes to board the ride from stepping onto the main station platform. Wild Mouse was running with only two people per car on a bunch of occasions. Also, I found FastTrack to be insanely poorly-implemented. The operators didn't seem to know how to handle it when there wasn't actually anyone using FastTrack. The Lightning Racer, Wildcat and Comet crews ALWAYS left those rows empty regardless of the queue, some of the other attractions filtered guests in from the row ahead - which meant that there was a "special" boarding gate that ran three times as fast as the others. But, even with all this trouble, the trip was worth it because the sheer selection of different coasters in Hersheypark is fantastic, even compared to parks like Six Flags Magic Mountain and Cedar Point. Also, front-seat rides on Skyrush make me teary-eyed, they're so good...

Also, according to the television - with the original ride profile an empty raft flew off the slide RollerCoaster Tycoon-style, straight into the ground nearby...

Sorry, as much as I like airtime I'd rather not get hurt. I don't care that it's "my responsibility" or that I should "shake it off" or whatever if I wipe out going over what used to be the jump hill. I want to be able to go down (and up and down again) the slide, get up out of the raft, and enjoy the rest of my day without having to worry about it...