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Alpenguy

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Everything posted by Alpenguy

  1. There is more and more electrical engineering involved in rides nowadays too, especially with the Disney/Universal big themed rides. (Not necessarily coasters though)
  2. The 8-year old was probably sitting in the nose or tail cone, which is air conditioned.
  3. Completely reprofiling the Matterhorn would be an epic engineering challenge. Pretty much everything is load-bearing and laid out precisely on the main supports, with the interior cavern walls and stuff all based around the current track. Without completely changing the layout it can't get a modern easy-reset block system, I'm pretty sure a lot of clearances exist only through grandfathering, and such a change would require a huge area closure with giant cranes and bare fake mountain for multiple years. Considering how long Space took I think a little roughness is worth it. Anything involving Tinkerbell is very hush hush, sorry. There is an awesome view at b-ball level though where a head sized hole looks out towards Autopia. Sadly the operations people can't go up to the very top since her new pixie dust delivery system moved in. The water system is pretty simple, just pumps for the waterfalls. The splashdown itself is the main braking for the ride, without it things couldn't function properly as they are and the capacity would drop significantly. With empty sleds, especially warming up in the morning, they just barely make it through with about 5mph speed left. Until recently the water was higher to brake more, and had to be adjusted for sleds to make it through unless you put at least 300lbs in each. Nowadays they still occasionally slow too much and fail to clear zones in time, especially on the B-side.
  4. In case the elevator has trouble, there's a non-ride path route down from the upper level that involves lots of stairs and ship's ladders in the hollow parts of the mountain. I'm pretty sure it's that marked beam, but not 100%.
  5. Oh my, apologies for the huge delay here. Life has been busy. Let's bring the thread back to life with this awesome then and now! Take a look at the red circle... Present-day (there's a brake/hole above the other side of the beam, source of the garbage stuck in there)
  6. So if 9 people were involved, that means at least 3 cars right? Wow...
  7. It's quite fun to break 650/hr on an 8 row, 1 train Vekoma Rollerskater. I do agree that Space is very impressive- their minimum interval is 20.8 seconds and they generally do very well on keeping up. As for the "two-finger touch" thing, that's all it takes to tell if a lapbar is locked most of the time, if people are white-knuckling it down or not responding to the self-check it does get a full tug. I think the safety record speaks for itself on whether that is enough. Outside of Disney or any parks mentioned here, the Giant Dipper at Santa Cruz tends to have fantastic operations, especially for the train/station setup they're stuck with. Of course the awesome sound it makes dropping into the tunnel is good incentive.
  8. Alaskaland in Fairbanks has a train and a shop area kind of like the older part of Knott's. There's also mini golf, a carousel, and the only coaster enthusiast attraction: the salmon bake. Hmm, apparently it's called Pioneer Park now, lame.
  9. The coaster is a clone of Monte Makaya, in Brazil. Colossus is Monte Makaya, with two extra twists. That park looks amazing, and has so much more than I expected from the few coaster pics on RCDB!
  10. I don't think there are any exterior pics yet from overpass-camping telephoto lens wielding photo fanatics yet, but the blue train looks amazing in the shop.
  11. Please help me, I finally found a computer that works! I'm locked somewhere underneath the castle, it's very dark and I haven't had anything to eat but week old turkey legs for the last week. There's some very cold equipment down here with a frozen chamber next to it, I think it's a little more than head sized, and... Actually I've just been really busy, and just got some good promotion news. I'll put up the finished layout tomorrow.
  12. Those layouts are very darn good except for an error on the south side of the mountain during the big circle at the end. Pretty much just a crossover confusion, but good vertical stuff otherwise on the green/purple one! There are 3 doors of various kinds way up on the mountain above the ride. One is a trap door in the actual top, the climbers use it all the time. Sadly the attraction people can't go up there anymore, it's past the protective cage for Tinkerbell's pixie dust storage silo. There's the spot Tink flies near, and a ledge on the southwest corner that Mickey climbs from. I feel like there's one more I'm forgetting, there's really not much reason to go up there and everyone has to be tagged out and kept track of. While I can't post a picture, there is a LOT more wood than you'd probably expect in the area above the ride. The snow effect areas on the lift are quite an adventure getting to as well- ladders are involved. Mostly, but not through personal experience unless it's in Fantasyland/Toontown. Tomorrow, it's transfer table time!
  13. It's pretty easy to learn if you know anything about bezier curves. I'm using Inkscape which is 100% freeware and very intuitive. Then again, I could just make one for Space too. I think Space is much, much easier to break from a small delay, whereas Matterhorn is far more likely to break down from the ride system. Matterhorn can eat delays no problem and flat out will not cascade ever with experienced people at the ride, or with only 9 sleds and a crew that's not completely zoned out. Station stops are really risky though since Hold 4 at Matterhorn advances really slowly and shouldn't be used with anything approaching behind it. Not that there's much time at all to recover them at Space, but then people can't jump out anywhere in 8 station zones at Space and they advance to normal in 5 seconds. There are also a lot more easy ways to be unsafely riding on the Matterhorn lift than Space. Matterhorn seems a lot easier to screw up a cycle-out though, it's very physical with unspoken teamwork being essential, especially when a bunch of petite girls are in the station. Everything also hinges on the ready table getting out quickly. As I'm sure the case would be at Space if it could unload in Hold 1, people are a lot more likely to get out quickly when told if they've already ridden. At ready, one stop forward from load... issues occur. A Space cycle out sounds pretty insane in the sheer speed sense though and crammed full blue room. For those who have no idea what I'm talking about in this whole paragraph, it can be explained another time. There are 2 already. It's just a really weird dip/turn thing that eats up energy, plus the hill actually being slightly higher, plus the short pushing area ending in a precipitous drop into the Fantasyland side splashdown pond. The main culprit is the train not clearing the hill fast enough to satisfy the computer it won't roll back, which results in the brakes on the crest activating in an automatic emergency stop. There's not a ratcheting anti-rollback there since there's no point with the intelligent and redundant brakes there anyways. Ok, the layout is basically done, so looking back to the first post: I'd say brake zones and similarities to Space are thoroughly covered, so remaining topics I could explain at length would be:"Transfer tables and station backups, hand in hand." "So you've pushed the big red button, your life of evacuation and reset." "Consoles: Why the Load panel is totally better than the PS3." "Sit DOWN!: Wacky guest stories." Also, obscure '78 construction pictures to come.
  14. ^ It seems to me like there's quite a step out of the rocket at Dispatch, considering bars is a bunch lower just like all the Matterhorn positions. I imagine that plan goes awry with confused guests fairly often? Yay! The layout is complete, with all the brake zones and proper overlapping. I haven't put in the black lines along the paths yet since I won't be able to easily adjust the paths once I do so, and there are a few small changes I need to make. They should make it MUCH easier to figure out what's going where. I'll also have several transparent mountain layers so it's clear where tunnels are and whatnot, and zone numbers.
  15. Space weighs its vehicles, Matterhorn doesn't. Space is 100% gravity, no boosters, and has much tighter timing between its midcourse brakes. It also has shorter brake sections that have to stop faster, so it has a maximum weight limit to prevent setting up more momentum than can be safely stopped. I think the total guest weight limit for the train there is ~2800 lbs or so, enough that loading 12 adults is generally frowned upon as too risky. If your train passes that limit you'll be turning to the left (maintenance bay) and getting reloaded. Matterhorn probably should weigh its vehicles, not for timing but for proper parking in the station. Don't get me wrong here, the most flesh you can possibly cram into a sled is 100% safe on any e-stop, but the low speed hold zones in the station tend to overshoot (by like 18 inches at most in the curve in, and ~6 in the straight part) or overspeed (9 ft/s instead of 6-7 in Hold 3) just because the splashdown is the primary braking for the ride and has a pretty constant amount of kinetic energy transfer. More mass, less speed is lost on the splash. Oh and either of those events is a automatic ride stop of varying degrees. It's also pretty much impossible to successfully push a really heavy sled out of one of the cascade stop zones. Theoretical capacity with 24.5 average dispatch between both sides and 8 riders in each train is 2350. While we're being theoretical, B-side can run just fine at 24 seconds too with skilled operators so let's say an even 2400/hr. The most I've seen is ~1940, I don't think more than 1 dispatch was missed on either side for the hour, so that difference of 400 is entirely just singly filled seats. When not being extra tough on seating people together, a typical decent count would be around 1600. With Florida Space style sleds the theoretical would drop to 1800 but it will be easy to consistently hit very, very close to that. The track is still pressurized just as in the original version. As far as I understand from the Ed/Karl book, it's mostly for convenience, though they were worried about union disputes from installing electrical systems in the other rail. Along with everything else pneumatic at Disneyland, it runs off of the mega-redundant park air supply with an hour's worth of backup in the mountain's accumulator in case that should somehow fail. The closest thing I've seen to that was a 5psi dip for a fraction of a second that sent every mountain into an e-stop as the computers caught it. Fun day for City Hall I'm sure. Full layout will be done tonight unless I get sidetracked.
  16. Ok, last layout update until at least Sunday night, this is everything until the tracks join up for the final circuit around the exterior of the mountain. The black square that appeared is the elevator's location, as you can see it's about the only place one could go. There's one error on the lift's overlap right now, but that'll be fixed eventually. I'll cover any non-layout questions whenever there's time to compulsively check forums/myspace/etc as so many of us tend to do...
  17. Ok, this should be tantalizing... I messed around with a vector-based illustration program today, and whipped up this so far. I'm doing things in layers so the eventual version will have black lines along the side of the purple track path (B-side will be orange, matching the stripes on the sled bodies) to make it clear what is over what, and the blue bars filling the station are various parking points that will continue along the actual track. Shouldn't take too long to finish now that I understand the program, and best of all, it could be blown up to poster size and look smooth since it's vectors. I tried it in No-limits once but it really has much tighter clearances than any vehicles/track in that program allow. Super-accurate through zone A-3!
  18. The official Disney overhead layout is extremely hard to follow. I'll whip up a multi-layer simple path drawing soon that makes it pretty simple. If you don't divide it up into at least 3 levels it's a tangled mess of spaghetti. Even standing in the middle of the mountain inside it's really hard to figure out what sections you're looking at above. I also have some physical pictures of the 1978 transformation that I've never seen on the internet, once I get the ghetto scanner (camera) configured I'll post them all. The most incredible thing about the cavern transformation is the tiny space where the lift passes through the center cavern, underneath the Skyway ride path. When you see it from outside it just doesn't seem spatially possible. Glad to see the interest in this thread, seems like the layout should be the first general question to answer right now. The second general question appears to be Jahan's current well-being, someone else will have to look into that.
  19. Addition to disclaimer: I shall not be held accountable in any way for explosions of Jahan or nearby collateral damage due to such explosions.
  20. Not many coasters have 42 block sections, 20 trains, direct water splashdowns, skid plate mid-course brakes only occasionally on top of hills, sophisticated seat belt restraint systems, free-throw basketball courts above, or manually controlled transfer tables regularly used with rider-filled trains on them. Come to think of it, I'm quite sure there's only one. It's the oldest of Arrows, retrofitted countless times to push safety compliance and capacity to the limit for almost 50 years, and I call it home. Disclaimer: I won't excessively "ruin magic" with this, and don't plan on saying much on anything an informed observer couldn't see by standing around the Matterhorn attraction for a few days, and won't post any backstage pictures of things that aren't easily viewable already from various online sources. I love my job and want to keep it! I do however think this ride is a crazy hodgepodge of about 40 years of coaster technology, and it is operationally more complex and interesting in my opinion than any other coaster I've seen. We just manage to hide that fact pretty well. Any question is fair game. First: Yes, there is a free-throw area marked out on the 5th floor, the level right above the ride. If you ride B side during fireworks and the work lights are on, you can see the floor of it right after the lift if you look up. Second: Yes I know the deal with the new trains. That is all on that I'm afraid. The RCDB facts don't say much, just twin tracks, 80' tall. Here are some more detailed statistics: Track A: 2,037ft, average 1:10 ride time from lift to station hold brakes. Track B: 2,134 ft, average 1:20 ride time from lift to station hold brakes. Top speed is ~22 mph. Dispatch interval: 10 train/track minimum is 24 seconds. B side runs at 25 seconds to keep the station moving consistently since the ride time is slightly longer. 9 train operation goes to 28s/29s officially, but is often run at 26 seconds with less consistent spacing in the station. There is actually a lot more time to check seatbelts with 10 sleds at 24 than 9 sleds at 26. The ride can run with as little as 20 second dispatch, but gets very dicey with block spacing in the holding zones since one of them takes almost 20 seconds to clear and uneven weights will quickly cause a backup. Until after the splashdown there is still plenty of block spacing on the gravity section like that. Today's main rambling topic: Block section history When the ride opened in 1959, there weren't PLC controlled brakes and block zones and all those fancy things. To keep unevenly weighted bobsleds from getting too close to each other, Arrow put about 25 "boosters" along the track, mostly in strategic spots like the big up-hill spot in the middle of the mountain and after the splashdown at the end. Each one is a ~5hp motor spinning a flywheeled tire that contacts the bottom of a sled going by. Set to the ideal mean velocity of a train at that point, each one would slow really heavy sleds or overgreased sleds, and give a bit more speed to light or otherwise slower sleds to keep things even. There were a few large skid pads that could deploy along the track for an emergency stop, but nothing like a modern brake system. In the station the operators manually controlled the brakes for each section until the sleds reached the tunnel entrance and an automatic timed brake dispatched them into the ride. Because this was all hardly fail-safe, the original bobsled nose wasn't hollow like the current ones are- it was 2 feet of impact foam. When 1978 rolls around and it's time to upgrade the Matterhorn, Disney pretty much copied the new block system on Space Mountain in Orlando. There were some huge problems though. Space Mountain was designed from the ground up to incorporate a modern mid-course braking system, with tons of straight sections of track on high sections of the track profile. Matterhorn has about 25 feet of straight track 1/3 of the way through the ride, and that's it. It also meanders along at near top speed the whole way through, with very few spots high enough to allow a gravity start at that point to make it through the rest of the ride. The engineering team did their best to calculate safe spots to add mid-course brake sections for emergency stops, but had to use skid brakes rather than the standard caliper/fin brakes on Space to work with the curves of the Matterhorn. Here is a nice picture of one of the skid-brake mid course spots. Specifically that one is B-10, which is the worse to evacuate or reset. That picture is facing forward, with the splashdown being right after the dip ahead. The 4 plates with rubber circles on them are the skid brakes, with an anti-rollback on the right between the 2nd and 3rd brakes. There are then 2 more safety brakes right on the other side of the dip. That zone is actually skipped if trains start backing up in the station and have to stop mid-course just because it is a direct uphill push to get a train out, and is the only zone precarious enough that ride operators can't evacuate guests from it themselves. The eventual result was 11 mid course brake sections on each track, with each one having 3-5 primary skid brakes and 2 extra safety brakes after those. The boosters of the original version are still there, with some new ones in the station holding zones too. Because of the placement, starting a sled after it stops in a zone requires 2 to 4 operators pushing it up to speed along that area of track. Some zones are easy and work just through gravity and the boosters, some requiring pulling a sled backwards uphill slightly to get enough run-up space. The other main disadvantage to the skid brakes is that they cannot act as trim brakes- if they're ever used, they're used to completely stop a sled. Here are the brake zone locations, in my words. Following along with you can pick them out pretty easily. A track [Tunnel] Right before the lift in the darkness, this lets dispatch happen before the lift is totally clear. [Lift] Just what it sounds like, it's one zone. Space in Florida has I think 4 zones of lift, still one chain but more precise computer control. [Zone 1] This stops right next to the ice crystals. [Zone 2] Right after the really wild turning drop to the right next to the first full bodied snowman, when the track turns left and joins up with B-side. [Zone 3] In the one straight section of track where A and B are parallel. [Zone 4] Right after the biggest uphill in the ride where several boosters and an anti-rollback are. [Zone 5] This one stops really hard, it's right past the next full bodied snowman (did I just call him fat?) during the fastest point of this track. [Zone 6] Just a little bit further along, right after B side joins up parallel again. [Zone 7] Right before the really sharp drop. The two safety brakes are actually on the slope down. [Zone 8] Circling back around the mountain, this is one you can see when walking from in front of the castle over. [Zone 9] This one sucks. It's the worst one that commonly has loaded sleds in it from a backup stop (cascade). That means since the ride stays powered up, the guests stay in it. You have to pull the sled back up the hill and then really push hard to get it up and over the next hill before the splashdown, and it's very common for a sled to not make it and get e-stopped on the next brakes. [Zone 10] Right at the crest of the hill before the splashdown. [Zone 11] The right turn after the splashdown. [Hold 4,3,2] There are then 3 trains of holding brakes before the station. The left curve into the straight part of the station is hold 2, which is the first place a sled actually stops unless the station is backed up. Ok, that's definitely enough written for today if not this week or lifetime. Like most of us I could ramble on forever about this stuff so toss out any specific old, old, incredibly old school Arrow questions or your own pictures or whatever! Some possible future topics include: Avoiding backups with 8 parking slots, 10 trains and a complete on the spot seatbelt replacement at dispatch; B-side brake zones; Control consoles and panels; Resetting from a complete loss of power; General wacky stories; Similarities to Space and other DLR attractions. Auf wiedersehen! (That means "Dear God I'm a nerd." in Switzish or whatever. This still only took like 30 minutes to write, I swear.)
  21. Nice report, lacking in Matterhorn pictures, but that can be forgiven. Just in case you're curious about the true nature of Disney efficiency ownage, Space runs about 1,600/hr. 10 trains, with 21 seconds between them. Matterhorn easily does that between both sides, but sends 24/25 seconds apart with 10 trains on each track. Splash usually handles 1350+ an hour, try doing that with a typical other log flume.
  22. My poor baby... I grew up going to and working at PGA, haven't been since 2004 but don't really care about going back. It was going in an incredibly positive direction right before the end of Paramount, with tons of new theming and tie-ins and Boomerang Bay, and now... Cedar Fair. Time will tell I guess, but the fact that they haven't replaced signs for 2 years now is a bit worrisome. Nice TR though!
  23. Good safety judgement doesn't necessarily have anything to do with age, but they usually increase together. Requiring operators to be 18 doesn't hurt anything at all, though proper training really is the most important thing IMO. If you don't know how to reset an e-stop or haven't ever actually done it, you're probably a lot less likely to not hesitate to hit one when considering if a situation warrants it.
  24. Gilroy Gardens needs a themed flume with singing vegetables. I'm just glad to see it's apparently stable for now, cause it's a fantastic little park plagued by mediocre location and an image that isn't eXtReM3 enough for people to mindlessly flock to it.
  25. I like Florida's more just because of the "PREPARE TO FORFEIT YOUR SOULS!" moment. Best unload spiel ever. Are there block brakes in the gravity part of Hollywood, or just at the reverse and the finale? (Well, along with the actual switches themselves.)
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