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Ride Availability/Operations 2022-24

E

Ethan

TS Member
I may be missing something here so someone please explain to me, but why have towers decided on quieter days to run smiler on 2 trains instead of 3. Seems a bit weird to me as if it's a quiet 4pm midweek day, why make queues longer than necessary
 
Ethan said:
I may be missing something here so someone please explain to me, but why have towers decided on quieter days to run smiler on 2 trains instead of 3. Seems a bit weird to me as if it's a quiet 4pm midweek day, why make queues longer than necessary
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Saves wear and tear on wheels which in turn saves money.
If the ride is getting less than a 15 minute wait there is no need to add the third.
 
jon81uk said:
Saves wear and tear on wheels which in turn saves money.
If the ride is getting less than a 15 minute wait there is no need to add the third.
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I disagree with this.

If a ride is running on reduced capacity then I expect to wait, at most, for the duration of one of the trains running around the circuit. 15 minutes wouldn't be acceptable, especially stood still in The Smiler's manky "optical procedure" room.
 
D4n said:
I disagree with this.

If a ride is running on reduced capacity then I expect to wait, at most, for the duration of one of the trains running around the circuit. 15 minutes wouldn't be acceptable, especially stood still in The Smiler's manky "optical procedure" room.
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Would you happily pay extra for that? Maybe for example paying the same price for entry as a peak day instead of the off-peak price?
 
At a park that I rarely visited, absolutely, I would pay an extra £5-10 on my day ticket to get several more rides. You could easily ride The Smiler three times in the 15 minutes that you're waiting for it due to reduced capacity.

Liseberg continued to operate Balder on full capacity on a dead Friday evening when I visited a couple of years ago. It was brilliant and I gladly would have paid extra for Helix to have also been on an extra train (it had a 20 minute wait on one train).
 
Ethan said:
I may be missing something here so someone please explain to me, but why have towers decided on quieter days to run smiler on 2 trains instead of 3. Seems a bit weird to me as if it's a quiet 4pm midweek day, why make queues longer than necessary
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Gotta sell those fastracks somehow.
 
If you are paid £60 per hour, and now sadly quite a few people are, then that would make sense in real terms...why waste your precious leisure time on unnecessary queues?
 
The capacity discussion (ie number of trains/ cars running) is one which has always really interested me.

I used to have a very concrete opinion that parks should always run coasters at full capacity whenever they can, even if it’s quiet.

As I’ve grown older and seen the operations at a greater number of parks, I now think that there’s more grey areas in this discussion.

If guests visit a park on a day when it’s absolutely dead, and everything is walk-on, they’ll have been on every ride by lunch time. Enthusiasts would love that and see it as a great opportunity to whore the coasters, but your average guests don’t think like that.

Most guests will just want to go on each ride once, and maybe have one re-ride on a handful of their favourite rides, but certainly not whore the coasters in the way that enthusiasts would.

If every coaster is run to full capacity and they’ve got on everything by lunch time, they’ll leave the park early feeling that they didn’t get good value for money because it wasn’t a full day experience, despite the obvious irony that they got on more rides than they would have done if they’d visited on a day when they needed to queue.

In other words, the public don’t care about ride counts, they want a full day experience.

I’d say that it’s in the parks’ best interest to have their coasters with queue times of around 15-30 minutes. This is the perfect balance of it not being so dead that everyone leaves early, but also not so busy that people are moaning about long queues.

So yeah, the older, wiser me has now changed his mind, and I’d say that in the situation I’ve just described, running coasters on less trains than full capacity can be a good thing to do in some circumstances.

I await the hate!
 
But standing in a fast moving 30 minute queue (say at Europa Park, or for Nemesis on a two train service) feels very, very different to standing in a 30 minute line that basically does not move (Croc Drop is hideous to wait for... or any low capacity coaster running a single train).

Non-moving queues can leave a very sour taste even when they aren't as long as peak day queues. As in your example, your average guest may not be able to articulate this, but they will certainly notice.
 
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Europa Park does not operate the rides on full capacity on off-peak days, which means that there will usually be at least a short queue for the major rides. A key point here is that a lot of their rides can run a lot of trains/boats/vehicles so they've got more of a sliding scale to play with. Compare that with Thorpe where most of the coasters are either on 1 or 2 trains and the result is "low capacity" can result in a pretty miserable experience all round.

Either by planning or good fortune, Towers currently have full capacity on both of their coasters with only 2 trains. Every other coaster with more than 1 train is below full capacity and of these, it's only really Galactica where it's causing significantly increased waiting times
 
Alton Towers is not a theme park where I have ever known them to actively cut capacity unless at least one of the following criteria is met:
  • It is an off peak day and therefore a reduced staffing complement which allows for single station operation on rides such as Oblivion and Galactica
  • Technical/Maintenance issues (such as is the case currently after winter maintenance has not been fully completed in time; I am confident these issues will be resolved by Easter)
  • Rides are walk on
  • Covid restrictions being enforced
In fact, when I worked at Alton myself, we never operated Rita on a single train even on the quietest days. A strategy was sometimes to utilise only the front row of one of the trains but the whole of the other train.
 
Enter Valhalla said:
The capacity discussion (ie number of trains/ cars running) is one which has always really interested me.

As I’ve grown older and seen the operations at a greater number of parks, I now think that there’s more grey areas in this discussion.

If guests visit a park on a day when it’s absolutely dead, and everything is walk-on, they’ll have been on every ride by lunch time. Enthusiasts would love that and see it as a great opportunity to whore the coasters, but your average guests don’t think like that.

Most guests will just want to go on each ride once, and maybe have one re-ride on a handful of their favourite rides, but certainly not whore the coasters in the way that enthusiasts would.

If every coaster is run to full capacity and they’ve got on everything by lunch time, they’ll leave the park early feeling that they didn’t get good value for money because it wasn’t a full day experience, despite the obvious irony that they got on more rides than they would have done if they’d visited on a day when they needed to queue.

In other words, the public don’t care about ride counts, they want a full day experience.

I’d say that it’s in the parks’ best interest to have their coasters with queue times of around 15-30 minutes. This is the perfect balance of it not being so dead that everyone leaves early, but also not so busy that people are moaning about long queues.

So yeah, the older, wiser me has now changed his mind, and I’d say that in the situation I’ve just described, running coasters on less trains than full capacity can be a good thing to do in some circumstanes.
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I'm not sure it's as binary as what you make out in terms of ride count.

Read any review by anyone on any site and, arguably, the number one factor individuals and groups cite is how many rides and rerides they were able to accrue during the course of the day. Enthusiasts' and the general populace alike.

Then, of-course, you have the rides spread out on a sprawling park which takes time to navigate and find your way around. Particularly for people who do not visit regularly.

Then there's stopping off for lunch.

And then there's the sprawling gardens and castle ruins. Not ride count but it gives added value and rounds off the day, particularly for individuals who are there for their grandchildren, nephews, nieces etc.
 
Auribus said:
I'm not sure it's as binary as what you make out in terms of ride count.

Read any review by anyone on any site and, arguably, the number one factor individuals and groups cite is how many rides and rerides they were able to accrue during the course of the day. Enthusiasts' and the general populace alike.

Then, of-course, you have the rides spread out on a sprawling park which takes time to navigate and find your way around. Particularly for people who do not visit regularly.

Then there's stopping off for lunch.

And then there's the sprawling gardens and castle ruins. Not ride count but it gives added value and rounds off the day, particularly for individuals who are there for their grandchildren, nephews, nieces etc.
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And the queues. Don't forget the queues! 😉😛
 
Auribus said:
I'm not sure it's as binary as what you make out in terms of ride count.

Read any review by anyone on any site and, arguably, the number one factor individuals and groups cite is how many rides and rerides they were able to accrue during the course of the day. Enthusiasts' and the general populace alike.

Then, of-course, you have the rides spread out on a sprawling park which takes time to navigate and find your way around. Particularly for people who do not visit regularly.

Then there's stopping off for lunch.

And then there's the sprawling gardens and castle ruins. Not ride count but it gives added value and rounds off the day, particularly for individuals who are there for their grandchildren, nephews, nieces etc.
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I think that’s a big difference between parks, because of the walking involved at AT, although it is possible to do everything in a few hours with almost no queues, you need to walk at quite a fast pace. Whereas at Thorpe I’ve done the whole park including the re-rides I wanted by 3pm on a quiet day and then gone home, which plays to the earlier point of it not feeling good value as you had a short day. Also the fact Thorpe is mainly thrills means I don’t want to re-ride as much, at Chessington I can spend time watching animals, at AT there is Sea Life and a couple of lower paced rides like Duel.
 
jon81uk said:
I think that’s a big difference between parks, because of the walking involved at AT, although it is possible to do everything in a few hours with almost no queues, you need to walk at quite a fast pace. Whereas at Thorpe I’ve done the whole park including the re-rides I wanted by 3pm on a quiet day and then gone home, which plays to the earlier point of it not feeling good value as you had a short day. Also the fact Thorpe is mainly thrills means I don’t want to re-ride as much, at Chessington I can spend time watching animals, at AT there is Sea Life and a couple of lower paced rides like Duel.
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Yep fair point. Alton does differ greatly to Thorpe and many other theme parks in terms of size, meaning that you probably can fill a day with walking between rides and areas, even on days when queues are minimal.

I do still strongly believe that having every ride at any theme park as walk-on is something which, in general, doesn’t benefit the overall enjoyment and feeling of value-for-money for your average guests, and that the ideal situation is queues of 15-30 mins which move at a reasonable speed. Guests, from my experience, are happy with a few of those type of queues for the bigger rides, and the odd walk-on for some of the support rides, like Duel for example, is an added bonus.

It’s very true that your average punters will notice much more when they’re standing in a slow moving queue than in a quick moving one.

This is why I’m always very insistent that Merlin shouldn’t go down the Six Flags, PortAventura route of heavily pushing mass use of fast track packages at the expense of everyone else.

Thankfully Alton are not at that stage yet and never really have been.
 
How many dispatches do you reckon the big 7 can achieve on maximum capacity?
I reckon it'll be something like:
Oblivion- 60 (960 pph)
Smiler- 56 (896)
Th13teen- 55 (1100)
Wicker man- 42 (1008)
Galactica- 41 (1148)
Nemesis- 40 (1280)
Rita- 35 (700)
Those pph figures are obviously assuming that each train is full which won't be the case but I reckon the dispatches will be something similar to that.
 
When I worked on Rita, we regularly achieved 980-1,040 per hour - which equated to 49-52 dispatches. I believe the record is 54 dispatches (1,080 per hour). Then, around 2010 or 2011, they took staff away and left the ride with only 2 platformers :( - never been the same capacity since.
 
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