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The Smiler - General Discussion

Scott

Former TS Team Member
Favourite Ride
Nemesis
After well over a year of construction and speculation, The Smiler has finally opened at Alton Towers. We had over 12,000 posts on the ride, and the various threads amassed over 800,000 views! Thank you all or making the discussion so diverse, interesting and fantastic to follow!

As the ride is now open, we have created the single thread in Alton Towers General Discussion for you to use to continue any discussion on the new ride.

All the old posts and discussions on The Smiler can be found in the Planning Portal section of the forum for archive purposes.

EDIT: If you want to leave a review for the ride, the Review Thread is still accessible on this board.
 
james.e.hyde said:
Does anyone know what the cameras are for in the back of the seats?

What cameras? All that's on the back of the seats is the optical illusions and the restraint lock light. When the restraints are locked this shows green, and when unlocked it shows red.
 
They were trying to move to 4 today I believe at some point, closed the ride to add a car I was hearing from queue staff.

Waited 3 1/4 hours today for it!!!

Yes, you read that right.
 
Haha, it's really not worth waiting over 2 hours for it. There are few rides I'd consider queuing that long for! But I guess many people won't get the opportunity to go back multiple times to get a good go on it due to the ticket prices. Still, this thing really should have been designed to get at least the same capacity per hour as Th13teen.
 
I think the best way to do The Smiler is to make it your last ride of the day.

The throughput is unfortunate. But if I were a day guest I would go around the rest of the park throughout the day and then go on The Smiler last before heading home.

It's really not worth queuing for it in the morning when you'll end up wasting a few hours of your day, best to do all that waiting in the afternoon/evening!
 
BigAl said:
Still, this thing really should have been designed to get at least the same capacity per hour as Th13teen.

Th13teen wasn't designed to have the same capacity per hour as Th13teen; its capacity took everyone by surprise. It's easy to say it should have been designed with greater throughput, but it already has a double carriage compared to traditional eurofighters and it has two lift-hills. Short of having dual-loading (which wouldn't speed things up much anyway) or a longer track layout with another break-run (impossible), there's nothing that could have been done to improve things.
 
Th13teen did get a high capacity when it first opened, but it's now settling between 1100 and 1200 per hour which is where they thought it would be. And you've just said yourself that a dual loading station would increase the capacity. Even if it's only very slightly, it's better than nothing. Capacity with rides like this is everything.

Edit: Look at Saw. The Smiler has more or less the same capacity as that, yet Saw only seats up to eight riders per car. Because they can dispatch two cars from the station but hold one back for a pre-show, they can begin loading two other cars straight away, instead of only being able to load the one. If they could send two trains out on The Smiler and hold one a little longer on the block before the first lift, they could probably get around another 100 riders out of it. Though it doesn't sound like much, 100 extra riders an hour can total around 800 extra riders a day on it by the time the park closes (assuming you count from 9am/10am to 6pm/7pm).


Double Edit: The Smiler's down again. It'll apparently be back open after lunch.
 
Well if both of X-Sector's coasters are down and Enterprise hasn't been working for around a week now, that just leaves the one arm on Submission as the only thing working in that area of the park. Oh dear! :p
 
Another embarrassing day for Alton, Oblivion shut around 11, The Smiler didn't even test, Enterprise still broken and only one arm of Submission working still - X - Sector was supposed to be the 2013 jewel in the crown for Alton but is quickly becoming a damp squib (very damp today!), more worrying though were the number of breakdowns across the park generally - maintenance clearly isn't a priority for Alton anymore...
 
Can anyone confirm if The Smiler opened at all today? I am worried as visiting on Sunday and I am worried it isn't going to open!
 
Smiler capacity should be around the same as thirteens, once they've sorted out these capacity issues.

Remember, it's only been running majority on 3 trains. It can run on 5. Once they've got 5 running, the queues should be flowing smoothly and throughputs similar to thirteen.
 
To get the capacity up that high they'd need to improve dispatch times significantly. When I rode the day after opening the quickest they managed to send a train was just as one was returning to the station, so running 5 would have resulted in pretty major stacking.

I'd like to see it run more efficiently than it does currently though, even if the duelling is lost, as current throughput is too low for a headline coaster at Towers.
 
John said:
To get the capacity up that high they'd need to improve dispatch times significantly. When I rode the day after opening the quickest they managed to send a train was just as one was returning to the station, so running 5 would have resulted in pretty major stacking.

I'd like to see it run more efficiently than it does currently though, even if the duelling is lost, as current throughput is too low for a headline coaster at Towers.

On Sunday they were running four trains and dispatching very quickly, there was very little stacking at all. At some points there was a train climbing the first lift hill, one at the bottom of the 2nd and one just coming round the final corner of the ride. It also helps that the staff member on the left starts checking from the back to the front (where they press dispatch) and the staff member on the right starts at the front to the back (where they press dispatch), something they weren't doing when it opened.

I believe all five cars have been passed off (as the final car that was wrapped up is now being used), however its yet to run with five because of the ride stalling, resulting in them removing a car from the track and not re-adding it yet.


james.e.hyde said:
Does anyone know what the cameras are for in the back of the seats?

I have noticed these, but they are only on one or two rows on certain trains. They look the same as what Saw used to have where you could buy on ride DVD. I imagine they are testing them to see how they look, etc, before either adding it to all the trains or removing them. All the rows (except front) do have brackets for the cameras.
 
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