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Ride Availability/Operations 2022-25

rob666 said:
Yet again, citation very much required.
I know none are new, and may need occasional "bits", but end of life?
I'm no engineer, but not really.
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Rita is 20 same age as Kingda Ka would have been and Top Thrill Dragster both now removed, Spinball Whizzer is 21 and was a cheap addition to add more capacity to the park when it was being brought out by Merlin. And Galactica being the original Prototype B&M Flying Coaster it will likely age with more issues.

So Alton Towers have themselves in a bind after years of neglect where the rides are aging.
 
Hid said:
Rita is 20 same age as Kingda Ka would have been and Top Thrill Dragster both now removed, Spinball Whizzer is 21 and was a cheap addition to add more capacity to the park when it was being brought out by Merlin. And Galactica being the original Prototype B&M Flying Coaster it will likely age with more issues.

So Alton Towers have themselves in a bind after years of neglect where the rides are aging.
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There is some serious mental gymnastics and flat out wrong statements going on here.
 
Hid said:
Rita is 20 same age as Kingda Ka would have been and Top Thrill Dragster both now removed, Spinball Whizzer is 21 and was a cheap addition to add more capacity to the park when it was being brought out by Merlin. And Galactica being the original Prototype B&M Flying Coaster it will likely age with more issues.

So Alton Towers have themselves in a bind after years of neglect where the rides are aging.
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Those are just numbers. Big One is 31 years old. Lisebergbanan(a) is 38 years old (same age as me!). Big Dipper is 102 years old. None of them are end of life.
 
Hid said:
Rita is 20 same age as Kingda Ka would have been and Top Thrill Dragster both now removed, Spinball Whizzer is 21 and was a cheap addition to add more capacity to the park when it was being brought out by Merlin. And Galactica being the original Prototype B&M Flying Coaster it will likely age with more issues.

So Alton Towers have themselves in a bind after years of neglect where the rides are aging.
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I don't think anything is end of life, just it may be very expensive to keep them up.

spin ball is quite basic, and is often quite reliable I don't really think it is nearing end of life.

Rita I would probably agree with, not that it is reaching End of life, but more it is probably getting expensive to keep maintaining the ride (similar to king and ttd) and givent it wasn't cheap to maintain to begin with, and fact it is a very mechanical complex ride I could see it being removed soon.

Galactica problems I think are that it is an old prototype ride and its trains are quite complex, I would imagine that with B&M's new flying coasters they probably have a updated and more reliable design, the trains probably could do with a refurbishment or replacement with new more reliable mechanisms which is probably expensive (each train is apparently £1m+) however I don't really think it is neassacery
 
Galactica and or Rita simply have to leave the park sooner rather than later and be replaced by more modern and reliable rides. Operationally Galactica’s been appalling all season, which I guess is an improvement on Rita!

I wonder how much of it is staffing related too, like are staff encouraged to take their leave before school trip season etc.
 
I don’t think “end of life” is quite as concrete as some make out.

Provided that the park keeps on top of the track and computational components, I don’t see that any ride ever necessarily has to hit “end of life”. While Nemesis was 28 when it got retracked, it had a few unique aspects to it, such as the pit and the strange supports that came with that, that likely accelerated the demise of the original.

Rides like Oblivion and Galactica don’t have such strange supports, so I imagine they could probably stick around longer without major work. Of the rides listed, I imagine Spinball also has quite low forces exerted on its track, so may be less mechanically intensive to operate than a ride like Nemesis.
 
Did Alton Towers used to have availability problems back on the where rides went down for unknown reasons.

Like when rides continually went down it wasn't long before they were removed like Dynamo, Boneshaker and Ripsaw to name a few
 
Stuff has always gone down for a few days at a time, right back to the early days of nemesis...the other two coasters in the area would be down for a few days at a time.
But if you weren't actually at the park, you just didn't know.

Now it is different as we have social media, geeks, freaks, happy clappers and the internet...all looking at ridetimes every few minutes, because they can.

Not me though, oh no.

Four thrill rides, monorail and skyride down currently...
 
Hid said:
Did Alton Towers used to have availability problems back on the where rides went down for unknown reasons.

Like when rides continually went down it wasn't long before they were removed like Dynamo, Boneshaker and Ripsaw to name a few
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I think it’s hard to say unless you were there.

One thing I can say is that the park has never had such constant scrutiny as it does now. Back in the “golden era”, the internet wasn’t nearly as prolific and accessible, so people weren’t critiquing availability and downtime from afar each and every day to add to a perception of poor availability. Back in the day, you only knew what was going on on the day you were there, to some extent.

Whereas now, armchair critics can look at queue times whenever they like and fuel a reputation for availability regardless of whether they’re at the park or not.
 
Just to put things in perspective, rides go on the ride availability for varying lengths of time, starting at single day closures.

The point of the page isn't to indicate that something is closed 'long term', just to let people, who are going in the next few days, know what rides might not be available.

The only ride that has any indication of time frame is Get Set Go. The other rides might not be available next week, but equally they may well be back up by then.
 
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