Houston Thrills

The renderings of the queue building showed flames on top of the pillars to the left and right of the Wonder Woman statue.

did they get the actual queue building open? I know they were really trying to get it done last week. It was being used last night for the VIP event. It was pretty much done from what I could see, except the flames weren't working. Below is a pic I snapped as I was walking by.

yeah. that was on Sat I will note that folks working the gift shop thought the statue of Diana would be at the entrance plaza, not in the "grouping station" . . but yeah, there is a stage of some sort there. . so maybe a statue of Zeus? (since he brought her to life?).. who knows. we were just bs-ing, and they freely admitted it could be anything they put on the pedestal at the entrance plaza (maybe just flowers or something) . . so the statue of Diana, could be going on that stage in there. The renderings showed a WW statue on the pedestal in front of the entrance, and another in the queue house flanked by flames.

The gift shop actually opened this past weekend, though they still have some work left to be done inside. There are a couple of pictures here.

I'm guessing it'll either have a roof or maybe shades like the queue house (second pic). There should also be shades along the exit path to protect from loose articles.

I saw a short video about it on the local news, and Jeffrey Siebert posted this on a Facebook group.

The circuit has been completed, with the golden (last) bolt put in place on Thursday.

I think you're referring to a massive propaganda movement known as The Lost Cause.

I'm guessing the netting is there because it's been a design element of Master Blaster slides for over 20 years. Why they were placed on the first one? I have no idea.

Larson built something like this 5 years ago, not sure if they ever got any buyers or not.

Gerstlauer's gonna be at least partially at fault for this. If it gave a green light, then the restraint failed.

No, not yet. All of Schlitterbahn's (company-wide) rides are either in-house or used, and I guess they just haven't felt the need to copy that, yet.

Robb the difference I see is one of necessity. A roller coaster is something that is an entertainment device and having it closed for a while doesn't have any real impact on anything other than the bottom line of the park. In Spain, closing the train system down for a short while would have a huge national level consequences and would be far more problematic. I look at it in the same way I look at a plane crash. Just because a plane crashes in the United States (with the obvious exception being 9/11) we don't ground all air traffic pending an investigation. To add to this, stopping train travel in Spain following the accident would be akin to stopping all air travel after a plane crash, while the closure of Rattler and Giant pending the investigation is more akin to the recent groundings of entire fleets of aircraft types (ex, Boeing 787s) pending investigation into certain possible safety issues.

It's currently under construction and may open by the end of the summer, though I'm not sure how likely that is.

This ride may actually get me to go to SFFT this year, even if only once. Looking pretty awesome.

Unless Fiesta's announcing better operations, I'm not sure I really care.

Surprisingly, this is all normal. Things have been this way on these rides for years. The odd thing about Judge is that almost all of the other crews at SFOT are great, so it's sort of an anomaly, but still expected.

Was out there yesterday and today and I noticed that there is a gap in the track, where I assume they're working on a joint. I wonder how many of those they're gonna need to fix. Also noticed some interesting stuff with regards to the queue, but I'll let Zingoman post that.

Freeze valleys for many reasons, but the train being too heavy isn't one of them, unless it was so incredibly heavy that it caused an undershoot.

There won't be any proslide rides as shclitterbahn parks are white water exclusive Schlitterbahn had their own water ride company, NBGS International, but they seem to have disappeared off of the face of the earth.

I've actually stated previously in this thread that there appeared to be enough room between the plates to mount a regular steel running rail, it just gets ignored, much like this will. In a month or so, people will be talking about the plates again.

The transfer tables work independently, and I've even seen one side dispatch 2 times before the other one dispatched once, even though that's rare. In fact, I believe they're not even allowed to move the tables at the same time anymore, as they used to do for years, because of problems it was causing. At SFOT, when they're running 2 trains, which seems to be pretty often, they're pretty good at having each side ready to dispatch when the other comes back. There was one time this year when i went that they had 4 ops on the ride instead of 5, though, which meant there was only 1 person checking restraints on each train. They were a bit sluggish that day, obviously.

Appears to be in better shape than it was ca. 2003, when it was running at AstroWorld, heh.

The track is about the same weight as the track it replaced. The forces will surely be different, but I'm sure they already thought about that when engineering the ride.

Dunno if anyone noticed, but the transfer track/table was put into place this past week.