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Ride Availability/Operations 2022-24

Operations on Park Today!
Wicker Man: 3 Trains and pretty smooth operations, the preshow is causing a lot of issues however.
The Smiler: 3 Trains, consistent duelling and queue moved well. Baggage Hold was open.
Thirteen: 3 Trains, baggage gold was open but was unfortunately struggling to operate fast, 3rd member of staff needed. Very Fast Dispatches.
Rita: 2 Trains, Dispatches on here were quite impressive in all fairness.
Spinball Whizzer: 6 Trains and consistent.
Galactica: 3 Trains, Excellent Operations
Oblivion: 5 Trains, felt bad for staff but were doing a good job. Good ops.
Nemesis: 2 Trains and very consistent Ops.

No disappointment in ops whatsoever today, minimal downtime aswell!
 
Sorry if this is a slightly random question, but I was just wondering; did RMT ever get close to its theoretical throughput in its early years?

It’s listed on TS’ page as having a theoretical of 1,061pph, but I’ve calculated that with its listed ride duration of 1m 50s, that would only allow a train to be parked for 46 seconds… is it me, or does that park time seem obscenely short for a 46-rider train? That’s a rider per second… even something like the throughput monster that is Silver Star at EP won’t have the train parked for only a second per rider…

The ride seemed to be operated quite well on my most recent visit, and it only hit 597pph… heck, even Alpenexpress at Europa, where the lap bars aren’t manually checked at all, was only getting about 900pph on my recent visit… although the VR in a few rows may not have helped there.

Did RMT ever get anywhere near 1,061pph? It seems almost impossible to me based on how it’s operated now and the throughput it gets, but I’d be interested to be proven wrong…
 
Matt N said:
It’s listed on TS’ page as having a theoretical of 1,061pph, but I’ve calculated that with its listed ride duration of 1m 50s, that would only allow a train to be parked for 46 seconds… is it me, or does that park time seem obscenely short for a 46-rider train? That’s a rider per second… even something like the throughput monster that is Silver Star at EP won’t have the train parked for only a second per rider…
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This doesn't make sense. Guests are not loading sequentially, one at a time.

46 sec would be the time it takes from the air gates opening, guests in all rows sitting down, and then lapbars being checked. This would be in parallel with guests disembarking and leaving the station. That does sound feasible to me, at least before they added the ridiculously small turnstyle at the exit and back when they allowed staff to still be on the platform when it was dispatched.
 
Didn't have a turnstile at the exit originally, it was a fast flowing gate.
I have tried to consult my copious notes taken with a stopwatch from back in the day, but sadly my archive only goes back twenty five years.
Yes it used to bang them through...two staff each side if I remember correctly, so I would say a possible target, but like all rides, it only takes one idiot...
 
Alsty said:
This doesn't make sense. Guests are not loading sequentially, one at a time.

46 sec would be the time it takes from the air gates opening, guests in all rows sitting down, and then lapbars being checked. This would be in parallel with guests disembarking and leaving the station. That does sound feasible to me, at least before they added the ridiculously small turnstyle at the exit and back when they allowed staff to still be on the platform when it was dispatched.
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Sorry, I worded that badly; that’s not what I meant. I know that guests all board at the same time, but I did think that 46 seconds seemed like an awfully short amount of time to check and send a 46 rider train given that even something like Silver Star takes about 50 seconds to check and send a 36 rider train.

What I meant by “one rider per second” was that a 46 second park time would only allow for 1 second to check each rider’s restraint (as a longer train would surely require more seconds parked for all riders to be checked adequately), but that is very crude, and not really true in actuality as park time is not only taken up by checking restraints… ignore that bit, it makes little sense in hindsight!

I wonder what stunts RMT’s throughput so much these days compared to the early days? Surely the host going back to the front on its own can’t add an extra 2 minutes to the park time compared to theoretical? (The 597pph figure I got recently would result in slightly under 13 trains per hour, or a dispatch roughly every 4m 37s, whereas the theoretical figure would result in slightly over 23 trains per hour, or a dispatch roughly every 2m 36s)
 
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Matt N said:
I wonder what stunts RMT’s throughput so much these days compared to the early days? Surely the host going back to the front on its own can’t add an extra 2 minutes to the park time compared to theoretical? (The 597pph figure I got recently would result in slightly under 13 trains per hour, or a dispatch roughly every 4m 37s, whereas the theoretical figure would result in slightly over 23 trains per hour, or a dispatch roughly every 2m 36s)
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Remember that once exiting passengers have left the platform, the exit host has to unlock the RAP gate and let those guests on. Only once they are seated does the cabin op open the air gates for regular guests.
 
Skyscraper said:
Remember that once exiting passengers have left the platform, the exit host has to unlock the RAP gate and let those guests on. Only once they are seated does the cabin op open the air gates for regular guests.
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They really should find a way to load RAP into the airgates, the loading from the exit is likely the biggest factor slowing everything down.
 
jon81uk said:
They really should find a way to load RAP into the airgates, the loading from the exit is likely the biggest factor slowing everything down.
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I remember a few years back they did trial having ambulant RAP use the fast track entrance, but it was eventually scrapped because that queue kept getting really long.
 
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Thameslink Rail said:
18 seconds?! Did they even check the restraints?
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They don't! They literally just glance up the train and send it if it looks OK... they make sure that everyone's sat down and adequately restrained before sending, of course, but there are no physical restraint checks whatsoever; EP has a lot of faith in the restraint sensors on Alpenexpress!

Would it be possible for Towers to operate RMT like that under British H&S?
 
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I would say that RMT will have managed 46 second dispatches back in the day. Over recent years, we've seen a knee-jerk panic by Alton Towers which means that:

  • Staff now have to be behind a locked gate when the train is running (even though the platform is enormous, and they do not do this at Chessington) - it takes 30 seconds alone for the staff at the back of the train to walk back to the locked gate...!
  • There is a slow, revolving gate which takes at least 2 minutes to filter through the guests getting off
  • There are more checks on each seat now - not to mention that the bar locks far lower than it used to, thus making it more likely to have delays due to comfort or guests not fitting
Alton have been the masters at cutting capacity on RMT. It's only around 2/3 what it ought to be.
 
I must admit, I'm stunned that Alton Towers was ever able to check and send that massive train in 46 seconds! I'm guessing that they never operated it Alpenexpress-style (I feel like not physically checking the lap bars wouldn't be allowed under British H&S...), so were the staff really able to check the bars that much faster back in the day?

I guess all the new procedures Alton have had to implement does show how much H&S has changed since the 90s, if nothing else...
 
Matt N said:
I must admit, I'm stunned that Alton Towers was ever able to check and send that massive train in 46 seconds! I'm guessing that they never operated it Alpenexpress-style (I feel like not physically checking the lap bars wouldn't be allowed under British H&S...), so were the staff really able to check the bars that much faster back in the day?

I guess all the new procedures Alton have had to implement does show how much H&S has changed since the 90s, if nothing else...
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The procedures that Alton Towers have implemented are not necessarily "rules" placed on them by H&S.

Otherwise. you'd have uniformity across the Merlin parks.

I would also point out that there are less staff than there were. I don't know exactly about RMT, but for example in 2005 to 2008 (including 2007 when I worked on the ride) Rita used to have four platform staff. This meant the train was checked much quicker than it is now, with only 2..

It's likely RMT had more platform staff to check restraints back in the day and, as soon as those restraints were checked, the train was sent.
 
AstroDan said:
I filmed this in 2013. Watch and learn. Oh and get your stopwatch out.

Alpenexpress:



Sent from my SM-G991B using Tapatalk
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Wow; they didn't hang about there, did they? That train only spent 17 seconds parked by my timing, meaning that with Alpen's 1m 44s ride duration (timed from a separate POV), they could manage a train every 2m 1s or roughly 30 trains of 38 riders per hour, which would make for 1,140 riders per hour! And that is with 8 less riders per train than RMT...

That's an insane dispatch speed; there were still people on the exit platform when the train dispatched, and I swear a man in front of you was still sitting down as well...

And am I correct in saying that the lap bars opened before the train was even fully stopped? Truly beautiful operations, to the point of near insanity; if it was operated any faster, I think it would border on unsafe!

EP must have made some slight concessions to H&S since 2013, as it wasn't operated quite that insanely on my visit in April; I pegged it at 896pph, which would make for a still absolutely phenomenal 49 second park time!
 
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