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Ride Availability/Operations 2022-24

Bowser said:
Does seemingly confirm that overcrowding is due to MAP then?
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Not necessarily, yesterday was also pretty great at all the Merlin parks, and wasn't a MAP exclusion day.

The only real thing that has changed is that RAP pre-book is being enforced now. I'd argue that the combination of MAP holders with RAPs have been partially to blame for the queue woes seen in recent years.

I spent yesterday at Chessington, a park well known for its long queues and poor operations. Every queue line time was overestimated, by about 33% and downtime was almost non-existent. I couldn't quite believe it.

Mandrill Mayhem did go down, toward the end of the day, but that was for cleaning after a guest incident. Took 15 mins to sort.
 
Did notice that all the Merlin apps now display a queue time of "0 minutes" for walk-on, whereas previously they would show "5 minutes".

Also minor gripe in that when we used RAP for Vampire at CWOA it said 60 minutes but literally a minute after we entered it changed to 5 minutes whilst we were lumbered with a 60 minute time-out. Not sure how the queue time could change from 60 to 5....
 
Let's get pedantic here.
I think it ticks all the boxes...walk on is walk on, even if you have to stop for a pre show.
It may take ten minutes of walking...especially for limping old gits, but that is still walk (limp) on.
 
little overview of ops today for anyone who's interested :)
wicker man - 3 trains - smashing it
nemesis - 2 trains - smashing it
galactica - 2 stations, 2 trains , 720pph, just restraint issues holding it back tbh
thirteen - 2 trains - 700pph - some downtime aswell
rita - 2 trains - 600pph
oblivion - 1st, 4 shuttles, average ops
smiler - 3 trains, just under 700pph, however downtime was high on this today
 
Ignoring the VR years, Galactica ops seem to have gradually declined over time to the point where it's now one of the worst operated rides in the park relative to it's potential. I always used to say it could benefit from running a 4th train due to the amount of time that would typically pass between a train leaving and the next arriving - often a train would have fully left and the next wouldn't have even got to the car park turn. Nowadays it needs a 4th train just to give it a fighting chance of having 3 available at any given time. There would be no benefit in actually running 4 though as it would double stack every cycle.

Ride operations at Towers seem pretty mediocre across the board nowadays, WM being the main exception. I was at Thorpe at the weekend and the ops on Stealth must have been about 1/3 -> 50% faster than Rita typically manages. Thorpe really seem to have had a push on throughputs recently (most obviously on Inferno), meanwhile at Towers it doesn't appear to be a priority nowadays.
 
Following on from the previous post, what exactly makes rita's dispatch time so much longer than stealth? They both have separate load and unload stations, ride length is similar, and trains are the exact same/same amount of riders per train.

Is it literally just down to the operators not caring/are less trained with rita? Or is there some sort of technical reason, such as allowing the hydraulic launch system to rest between dispatches?
 
Dhev123 said:
Following on from the previous post, what exactly makes rita's dispatch time so much longer than stealth? They both have separate load and unload stations, ride length is similar, and trains are the exact same/same amount of riders per train.

Is it literally just down to the operators not caring/are less trained with rita? Or is there some sort of technical reason, such as allowing the hydraulic launch system to rest between dispatches?
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Well they are absolutely not similar length so it is near impossible to dispatch as many times per hour on Rita as on Stealth.
 
Ethan said:
Well they are absolutely not similar length so it is near impossible to dispatch as many times per hour on Rita as on Stealth.
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thats true, but then again rita has the advantage that it will never rollback, so technically they can move the empty train to the load platform quicker than stealth can, as that must crest the top hat before the next train can move forward.

From the launch to the block zone on rita before the unload platform, its around 50 seconds, which granted, yes, is longer than stealth, but the empty train will have already have spent maybe 30-35 seconds at the load platform already - meaning it could technically maybe dispatch another vehicle within a minute and a half, granted the safety checks are all sound
 
Dhev123 said:
thats true, but then again rita has the advantage that it will never rollback, so technically they can move the empty train to the load platform quicker than stealth can, as that must crest the top hat before the next train can move forward.
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from what I have been told, RITA dose have to wait for the train to crest over the tallest hill before allowing the next train, so it would be a similar time as rita has to launch and do a turn before going over the first airtime hill
 
jibbsie said:
from what I have been told, RITA dose have to wait for the train to crest over the tallest hill before allowing the next train, so it would be a similar time as rita has to launch and do a turn before going over the first airtime hill
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ahh I get you, never knew that actually!

I think we can still agree though that it does not need to take the time that it does to dispatch rita, especially as its poor throughput results in awful, non-moving queues on peak days
 
I worked on Rita in 2007. That year, 1000 was the target. The hourly record was 1060.

Then, we had three additional staff:

1. Entrance host to check heights before queue entry.
2. Platformer
3. Platformer

Having two extra platform hosts meant it was much quicker to check a train.

It massively frustrates me when parks have rides that can achieve certain throughputs but due to their own decision making, they get nowhere near.

Rita now routinely gets 700/h. Inadequate for a major ride at Alton made even worse by FT/RAP.
 
In answer to the question re Stealth getting a higher throughput than Rita, the team on Stealth just always smash it. But the team also made some changes to improve dispatch times;

- Installed new self closing exit gates on the offload platform, to speed up the offloading process
- Changes to the announcement on the offload platform, and making it louder to speed up the offload process
- Fixed the countdown timer on the load platform, for a target to work towards on each dispatch
- Installed a new barrier between the load and off-load platform
- New signage on the offload platform

The above changes made the average launch time decrease from 101 seconds to 69 seconds, so pushing the hourly throughput to over 1000pph.

They've also added a screen in the queue just before you reach the platform, to display pre loading information to further increase throughput. I'm not sure if this is yet in operation though.
 
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