El Toro_Ryan

Those pictures are a few weeks old. The q line is basically finished and there are plenty of plants. The entrance sign is almost finished as well.

I think the problem was that one air gate served all 4 seats in a row and having the two outside seats offset was confusing to riders. B&M's trains are a little different where the offset outside seats are actually a separate row with its own set of air gates.

To any members of The Coaster Club of Great Britain that posts or reads on TPR, I hope you guys all enjoyed your ERT session at Toro this morning! I was operating for part of it. I was happy to hear that most of you thought El Toro was your favorite coaster!

If that's the case, it's probably because the park wants to open the ride early before fully testing the second train. Goliath's construction was similar to El Toro's where everything seemed to come together later than expected at the last second and delays occurred. Toro opened with one train I believe so that its opening wouldn't be too delayed and I'm guessing the same thing is happening with Goliath. Hopefully it's only for a short amount of time because two trains is obviously better than one. Lol Unless you actually enjoy waiting in long lines.

awesome. are they going to have a season pass holders opening only perk? I'm not sure but I'll let you know if I find out.

I've been hearing the park is aiming to open the ride next weekend. Hopefully they stay on target.

The theoretical capacity of El Toro which is 1,500 people per hour is not actually possible. The most the ride can run at is around 1,300 people an hour because of its blocking. This may be because of the slowed down lift hill which adds another 10 or 20 seconds to each ride cycle.

I believe Medusa runs on steel wheels while the other hybrids run on polyurethane wheels.

I don't believe the turnaround was retracked. As far as I know, only a smaller portion of the second camelback and the turn into the waiting breaks was retracked. Everything else is as it was. The retracked portions seem a little different though. The new track is prefab track but metal braces were also placed where the new track is. I also saw Zumanjaro testing at full height today. I filmed several videos and I just sent them to Robb. Hopefully he'll post them soon for you all to see.

You are absolutely correct. I was on the phone earlier today with my 6F homepark (SFGAm) to verify this. What a bummer, I'll be forced to visit Goliath before our first venture to Nitro and El Toro! Guest relations let me in for free. El toro is running the best it ever has this year. They retracted the only rough parts and it's not loosing any speed. So much airtime even at the end! Batman is also running amazingly. Nitro is in a deteriorating state but still amazing. Even superman had an empty station today it was fantastic! I was there today too as a guest. El Toro was running so good. I usually test ride empty trains in the morning and it's so much slower. I forgot how much airtime the second half can have and the laterals in the twister section were nuts. I also tried out Nitro's C train finally and it was really bad. The park needs to fix it or buy a new train if they have to. I also saw Zumanjaro testing. They were dropping cars one at a time from left to right about half way up the tower. Hopefully they'll be doing full drop tests soon.

Zumanjaro's entrance sign started going up.

Maybe some bamboo roofing that would fit the Golden kingdom Theme? Or something like the Bug's Life queue at Walt Disney World - I know that queue has some netting over the pathway and it doesn't look out of place. The park has built a shade structure that covers the entrance and exit line on the portion of the line that circles Ka's tower. This picture was taken a few weeks ago. I'm pretty sure the shade structure has been finished since then but I couldn't find a photo of it. Also, the park has been testing the catch cars and cars together. I don't think the cars have actually been dropped yet but they have been raised and lowered several times. (Edit) I just found this pic, the roofing does not have bamboo but just regular roof shingles.

Lol El Toro speeds up greatly during the day. Some of its morning test runs are scary slow and the train doesn't even run fast enough over the Rolling Thunder hill to make the fart noise. The state of New Jersey prevents SF from doing so. The ride originally had an observation deck and the original q line was in the infield of the ride but after Ka had its accident opening year, the state of NJ did not want anyone near the launch track. The q line you see today is actually the original overflow q line and the path the q line takes now blocks off where the entrance to the observation deck used to be.

I think that's ridiculous. I'm not saying they should use all the four as that apparently slows down the queue once it splits but they could use one side of the station with both the loading and unloading platform working. Given the trains only carry 18 it would be significantly better. Also, why did they go with only one row for the last car in the first place? I know the trains are made so that a last row can be added but why haven't they done that? someone wrote on the SFGAdv thread that only using one loading/unloading area and only running 3 trains gives them the best capacity. i dodnt buy it, and still think its a money issue. TTD uses 5 trains and has 2 loading areas and the separate unloading areas. I work at GADV and I know for a fact the ride gets better numbers now then it did when it used all 4 load stations. Last year was the first time the ride gave over one million riders in a season. The switch track would slow down cycles because you had to wait for it transfer which wasn't the quickest process. Plus the switch track would have problems a lot and cause the ride to go down. Idk why the park doesn't switch in the last row of seats in on Ka but that's up to management. 1 loading platform is used in place of four for better capacity and to save on expenses. Not using the switch track makes sense, but why not use the second station behind the one in use for unloading? I just don't mathematically see how it would be more efficient to not have a separate, connected unloading station like MF utilizes. To answer your question, the park staffs 4 people to check the 18 passenger trains on Kingda Ka rather than use an unload platform. This way, trains can checked and dispatched faster to make up for the lack of an unload station. Plus the ride runs 2 trains a lot so having an unload station really only works well if you have 3 trains. Thanks for the answer. It makes sense, but seems a little cheap to not want to hire two more attendants to improve capacity on the park's main draw for out of town guests. His brings up another question, though. Why do they have four attendants on Ka, checking four to five seats each, and two on El Toro and Nitro, checking 18 seats each? It would make sense to be just the opposite, IMO. Thanks Ryan. Yeah that is kind of backwards but Ka needs to send out way more trains an hour than Toro or Nitro do to get good numbers. I think they shoot for atleast 60 trains an hour there while El Toro shoots for 30 an hour. I'm not sure about Nitro but probably around 40. Ka needs those extra people in order to do so since it's OTSR can't be checked as fast as lapbars. Although I feel like all of our rides could use 4 people checking restraints. When we have 4 people checking at Toro, it's almost impossible for us to stack. That's a decision made by management though.

This sounds about right. SFNE gets lots of stupid, trashy people who have no clue what the hell they're talking about, and that kind of behavior is absolutely par for the course for them. LOL GADV gets the same kind of people. I'll be working the entrance to El Toro and it'll have an empty line but the GP walks up to it and sees the 90 minutes sign from this point and they leave thinking it's actually a 90 minute wait for a non existent line. People will also see trains stop on the lift when we dispatch too quickly and they freak out and get out of line. They'll walk out of the line and tell me the ride isn't safe.

I think that's ridiculous. I'm not saying they should use all the four as that apparently slows down the queue once it splits but they could use one side of the station with both the loading and unloading platform working. Given the trains only carry 18 it would be significantly better. Also, why did they go with only one row for the last car in the first place? I know the trains are made so that a last row can be added but why haven't they done that? someone wrote on the SFGAdv thread that only using one loading/unloading area and only running 3 trains gives them the best capacity. i dodnt buy it, and still think its a money issue. TTD uses 5 trains and has 2 loading areas and the separate unloading areas. I work at GADV and I know for a fact the ride gets better numbers now then it did when it used all 4 load stations. Last year was the first time the ride gave over one million riders in a season. The switch track would slow down cycles because you had to wait for it transfer which wasn't the quickest process. Plus the switch track would have problems a lot and cause the ride to go down. Idk why the park doesn't switch in the last row of seats in on Ka but that's up to management. 1 loading platform is used in place of four for better capacity and to save on expenses. Not using the switch track makes sense, but why not use the second station behind the one in use for unloading? I just don't mathematically see how it would be more efficient to not have a separate, connected unloading station like MF utilizes. To answer your question, the park staffs 4 people to check the 18 passenger trains on Kingda Ka rather than use an unload platform. This way, trains can checked and dispatched faster to make up for the lack of an unload station. Plus the ride runs 2 trains a lot so having an unload station really only works well if you have 3 trains.

I think that's ridiculous. I'm not saying they should use all the four as that apparently slows down the queue once it splits but they could use one side of the station with both the loading and unloading platform working. Given the trains only carry 18 it would be significantly better. Also, why did they go with only one row for the last car in the first place? I know the trains are made so that a last row can be added but why haven't they done that? someone wrote on the SFGAdv thread that only using one loading/unloading area and only running 3 trains gives them the best capacity. i dodnt buy it, and still think its a money issue. TTD uses 5 trains and has 2 loading areas and the separate unloading areas. I work at GADV and I know for a fact the ride gets better numbers now then it did when it used all 4 load stations. Last year was the first time the ride gave over one million riders in a season. The switch track would slow down cycles because you had to wait for it transfer which wasn't the quickest process. Plus the switch track would have problems a lot and cause the ride to go down. Idk why the park doesn't switch in the last row of seats in on Ka but that's up to management. 1 loading platform is used in place of four for better capacity and to save on expenses.

Zumanjaro's catch cars have been raising and lowering all day. I think we are getting very close to full testing

Double stations aren't always faster. It depends greatly on dispatch intervals, which are very slow with flying coasters. I believe SFGam got the 8 car trains to make up the lost capacity, if I'm not mistaken. Not *Everything* Six Flags does is being cheap or lazy. ^Agreed. And a lot of parks with a double station on their rides don't even use both stations most of the time. SFOG and SFMM pretty much only use one of the two stations on their flyers.

It's completely random and you don't get a choice which tower you want to ride. Don't bother asking as you WILL be greeted with a rude response no matter how nicely you ask. You'll have no problem riding everything in a day but I'd suggest riding Goliath first because it breaks down all the time. The sooner you get that credit the better because it will break down at some point. It's also unable to operate if it's cold, raining or too windy. I'm really interested to hear your thoughts on the park... mainly it's operations as I always find them to be horrendous, especially when compared to the operations at Great Adventure which are stellar (except for Bizarro). I know you work for Six Flags and can't come out bashing the place, but given the way the ride ops act towards the guests at Great Adventure I'm expecting you to be pretty disappointed in the policies and staff at Six Flags New England. Thanks for the advice. I'll be sure to post up a trip report after my visit. I know an extra brake fin was added to the brake run following the collision back in like '04 but I don't know if that was before '05 or after. That's interesting though. You can tell Intamin learned their lesson with the short brake runs found on the Supermans. Their mega coasters after that have much longer brake runs.

Hey me and some friends plan to go to SFNE soon. We were just wondering what's the best plan of attack to get all the coasters in and during what months in the summer does Bizarro usually run the fastest?

El Toro used to terrify me when it first opened. I was only 10 and pretty short. The airtime used to scare the crap out of me and I was so short that in order to grab the grab bar, I had to completely lean forward. I later learned to ride with my arms up though. haha

All the times I've went for the past couple of years Ka had less than a fifteen minute wait with two trains. It's popularity has definitely decreased over the years. I know for a fact that the capacity of the ride is better now then it was before. The ride gave over a million rides last year and it's never done that before.

The tree that bends doesn't break haha literally. Check out this video of Rattler before they redid it. Structures need to be able to give into the forces their submitted to. It's how forces are absorbed. ^You beat me to it lol

The thing I don't like about the launch is that the train doesn't track very well and the back of it shimmies back and forth as it accelerates. IMHO, the only decent seat on Ka is in the front row. I don't know what they did different than TTD, but I've never experienced that issue on Dragster--every seat is a good seat. I noticed that on Dragster too when I was at Cedar Point a few days ago. I rode in the backseat and it was very smooth. I think Kingda Ka's problem is that the trains are too bulky and top heavy with the over the shoulder restraints. With lapbars, TTD carries a lot of its weight low to the track. But for Ka, the locking mechanisms are located on the seats making the trains more top heavy. Give the train a little shuffle from the launch and physics will take over. Also, Kingda Ka's launch track is much higher off the ground by the end of the launch then TTD's which gives the track more wiggle room which might contribute to the roughness. I've always felt like Ka should have been built with lateral supports on the launch track in addition to the simple straight columns. You can really see the launch track wobble when the train launches down the track. Much more so than TTD. Notice the extra bulk behind the seats and at the head rests for the shoulder restraints. Verse this.