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Ride Availability/Operations 2022-24

Galactica was on three crafts and two stations but the dispatching was…. Not sure how to put it other than weird. They just were not getting them out fast enough and leaving plenty of empty seats.

Nemesis was running like a well oiled machine and eating people like we know it can. Thankfully as operations are poor elsewhere. Two train service.

Thirteen had half of one train sitting on the lift this morning, eventually opened to a 90 minute queue which never dropped below 60. Not very good that we are over a week in and it’s not on three trains.

Oblivion was on 5 trains and two stations, very good operations today on this. Kept the queue nice and low.

The Smiler, three trains, running like a shopping trolley as per usual. Long queues, even single rider took 30 minutes today.

Wickerman, two trains but dispatched in good time. Needs to be on three sooner rather than later.

Rita, one train, enough said. Jumped on it early this morning and had an ok ride. Can’t believe this is still on one train

Ops are improving, today saw some good reliability throughout the park which is a stark contrast to yesterday. They can do it if they want, they need to sort the capacity before Easter weekend otherwise we can see another round of complaints. Rapids testing but never opened.
 
Craig said:
Urgh my pet hate - I'd be pushing back and escalating your complaint on that daft excuse of "you can visit when you like". It's insane that it's being used in this day and age. It's £45 in fuel for me before I even go through the gates - and you have paid for a pass to visit and experience a park that's ready for visitors when you like, not to revisit on the off chance that things might be better at a later date.

Passholders are paying customers, saying you can go back does not remove their responsibility to deal with complaints in a fair and reasonable manner. Your concerns should be dealt with in the same way as a customer who has a day ticket - you've both paid to enter and experienced the same issues at the end of the day. The fact you've paid in advance for a year is completely irrelevant to the resolution they should be presenting. Sure a return ticket isn't of much use, but there's plenty of other things they could and should be doing/offering instead of "nah, you can come back mate".

Anyway, my personal rants about lazy complaint handling aside - we're straying a little more into the customer service side of things which we have plenty of dedicated topics for. Let's try and stick to ride availability as much as we can. Thanks :)
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I wasn't in a position to complain on the day but have contacted guest services and did make many of these points (plus the fact we have spent money on food, transport and accommodation and would have to again if we were to visit so it's never a "free" day out).
 
Matt N said:
For anyone who's interested, I managed to time various ride throughputs on my visits to Alton Towers yesterday and today. The throughput readings I managed to attain are as follows:
  • Galactica (Theoretical: 1,500pph on 3 trains/2 stations): 871pph (3 trains/2 stations, 24th March 2024, average of 10)
  • Nemesis Reborn (Theoretical: 1,400pph on 2 trains): 1,301pph (2 trains, 23rd March 2024, average of 8)
  • Oblivion (Theoretical: 1,900pph on 7 shuttles/2 stations): 1,146pph (5 shuttles/2 stations, 24th March 2024, average of 7)
  • Rita (Theoretical: 1,150pph on 2 trains): 394pph (1 train, 23rd March 2024, average of 5), 357pph (1 train, 24th March 2024, average of 8)
  • Runaway Mine Train (Theoretical: 1,061pph on 1 train): 473pph (1 train, 23rd March 2024, average of 4) Note: The back car was missing, so the 473pph figure, which assumed a full train of 46, would have been more like 432pph in reality due to the train actually only carrying 42 riders as opposed to the usual 46. The average dispatch interval was 5m 49s, for reference.
  • Wicker Man (Theoretical: 952pph on 3 trains): 829pph (2 trains, 23rd March 2024, average of 8), 770pph (2 trains, 24th March 2024, average of 8)
I also have a few other side observations and insights to offer:
  • Operations on Nemesis Reborn were noticeably slower today than they were yesterday. Yesterday's operations, listed above, saw dispatch intervals of 90s or less and little to no stacking, with a train often being dispatched as the one in front of it was still completing the course. Today, however, dispatch intervals of no faster than 2 minutes were being attained and stacking was routine. I'm not sure what the difference was, but today's operations were notably slower. I was unable to get a proper timing, but a brief attempt I made at timing saw a dispatch interval of over 2 minutes being attained, and I'd say that this was quite par for the course for the time I was in the queue. Pretty much every train I saw stacked outside the station for a notable period. For some perspective, I waited 60 minutes from the gun for my ride yesterday, while I queued 50 minutes from a little before the Phalanx shipping container lab for my ride today.
  • The Smiler looked as though it might have been running 4 trains today, but I wasn't sure. I say this because the ride was often attaining perfect duelling, which I wouldn't imagine is possible on only 3 trains!
  • I noticed that the intervals on Galactica appeared to be pretty inconsistent when I was doing the timing above. The intervals appeared to range between 80s and over 3 minutes!
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Galactica went down to 2 craft, 2 stations at some point yesterday, dunno when you clocked it.
 
Poisson said:
Galactica went down to 2 craft, 2 stations at some point yesterday, dunno when you clocked it.
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I clocked it when I was in the Nemesis queue line between 12pm and 1pm. I then rode it directly after getting off Nemesis, and it was on 3 trains/2 stations.

I’d have to agree with @Blackhole_Sun regarding Galactica’s operations yesterday. When I timed it, the operations did seem weird, and rather inconsistent. From Nemesis’ queue line, I was genuinely struggling to tell whether Galactica was operating flat out on 2 trains or slowly and inconsistently on 3. Granted, the operations did seem a bit faster when I was actually queueing for it, but they do seem to struggle a bit more with getting good operations on Galactica as it gets older. I guess that’s not really too much of a surprise, as at least 1 or 2 restraints seem to need rechecking on every train these days.
 
I think Galactica’s issues are 90% restraint related. Yesterday they were loading the station and batching quickly, unloading and loading the seats quickly and checking restraints all quickly, there was loads of staff down there and I was very impressed.
But more or less not a single train leaves the station without hearing the man in the control box saying ‘row X seat Y’, which means another restraint check taking valuable time.
 
Mick said:
I think Galactica’s issues are 90% restraint related. Yesterday they were loading the station and batching quickly, unloading and loading the seats quickly and checking restraints all quickly, there was loads of staff down there and I was very impressed.
But more or less not a single train leaves the station without hearing the man in the control box saying ‘row X seat Y’, which means another restraint check taking valuable time.
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Whilst it is right that the issues are restraint related, it is more-so a sensor issue. Ultimately the board doesn't see the restraint as suitably locked. I think it was about 4-or so years ago when at Towers they had some serious issues with this. I remember a train being in the station for about 10 minutes with most seats being checked. Maybe if we get the Galactica retheme we all want, the might look at the train/ control issue... or maybe even updated trains?
 
I can tell you from experience of riding plenty of other flyers in parks in the states, they don't seem to have the same restraint issues AT have. A couple of years ago I remember having a few rides on Tatsu at SFMM and being so impressed at how much quicker and more efficient the dispatches seemed to be.

Maybe with this being the first B&M flyer, it's just had more time to go wrong over the years.
 
gclough79 said:
I can tell you from experience of riding plenty of other flyers in parks in the states, they don't seem to have the same restraint issues AT have. A couple of years ago I remember having a few rides on Tatsu at SFMM and being so impressed at how much quicker and more efficient the dispatches seemed to be.

Maybe with this being the first B&M flyer, it's just had more time to go wrong over the years.
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B&M massively changed the design of the flyers after Air opened. I think in theory Towers can upgrade to the newer design but it would be extremely expensive to do.
 
absolutely shambolic that Th13teen can’t operate in the rain again. 3 years now since this problem came about and they still haven’t sorted it
 
Danscott22 said:
It can, it was operating in the rain the other day
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Yeah, it’s a bit of a myth that it can’t run in any rain. It might be a bit more sensitive to the weather than some of the other coasters but clearly it’s current issues aren’t weather related - it’s been late opening, going down during the days and running reduced trains pretty much every day since the season started, whatever the weather.

I’d argue that last year it was one of the most reliable coasters in the park.
 
Galactica and Th13teen reliability has been awful so far this year. Always opening late, then when they do open they close not long after. Needs sorting for the busy period next week
 
Alphe86 said:
I would be massively in favour of putting off any big developments another year to fix up all of the current offerings.
Imagine a world where 95% of the time the coasters are reliably running on all cars/stations .
Joyful.
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Completely agree with this. Even if the coasters don’t have all the trains on they at least need to be open 95% of the time. Galactica and Th13teen really need prioritising because they’ve been closed a lot. Even though Rita is on reduced capacity it’s actually been one of the most reliable rides so far with quite little downtime. Nemesis too has been fairly reliable and hasn’t faced as many teething problems as I thought it would
 
Th13teen though on a single car - even if reliable - has less throughput then a large scale flat ride which doesn’t help.
It needs to be running 3 trains as it’s one of the few 1.2m offerings so will always be super in demand

And as for Galactica.. it needs investment to fix the car issues or binning off. It’s a liability as it stands.

If removed, towers need another “gateway” 1.4m coaster to nudge people onto “big rides”’which is probably substantially more expensive then getting 4 newer style carriages
 
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