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B&M's current MCBR positioning

D1993 said:
I'm saying from the time the train stops in the station, we have 35 seconds to send it at earliest. Unloading and loading happen at the same time, as soon as the train stops in the station, gates are opened, guests are directed to the back and guests are loaded all at the same time. We didnt wait for everyone to exit the platform. Whether or not crews are operating the ride the same way this year, I'm just pointing out with a very efficient crew when running the ride at it's best you can get 1800+ hours.

But with theoretical capacities, they can be wrong.
Do you know that millenniums theoretical capacity used to be a lot higher? Same for Raptor. A theoretical capacity is just in theory, when it comes to actual action rides sometimes perform faster than expected.
I have talked with the manufacturer worker themselves (Walt), and he described the capacity as the estimated guess of what the ride could achieve. Sometimes they can be wrong.
The best way and most accurate to find out what a rides capacity is, is to work on the ride location with an efficient crew and see how far you can push it.
Click to expand...

Like I said I am sure you are proud of your work, and I'm sure you guys bust ass over the summer. But after over a decade with 4 companies and about 7 parks across the country, you are never going to convince me this:

Load --><-- Unload Gatekeeper Train

is more efficient than :

Load--> Hulk Train Unload -->

Not to mention Gatekeeper has cubbies on platform where Hulk does not, causing even more of a slow down.

Of course the theoretical can change. Any change in operation; removing/adding blocks, slowing/speeding lifts, slowing/speeding station wheels, removing whole trains from operation can change what the theoretical is.

From a business perspective manufacturers are not underestimating on their theoretical ride capacity, this isnt like telling a girl your cock is 6 inches when its really 6 and a 1/2, to give her the bonus half inch. One of their selling points is how many riders they can put thru, to increase the ROI for the parks (photos, merch, etc...) shelling out millions of dollars.

:)

EDIT TO ADD: I mentioned in the Trip Report but I over heard KI ride ops saying their goal for the B&M's, both Banshee and Diamondback, where 40 dispatches an hour (1,280 with no empties). That is more in line with the realistic expectations I have seen for B&M, excluding monsters like Hulk.
 
^ It is true, there is nothing easier in a loading process than a standard lap bar/OTSR. Having two stations can also help with egress and speed up rider's access to the train (I'm looking at you, Skyrush). Gatekeeper does load rather quickly however, as it is a standard OTSR. If anything is going to slow down the process, it will be human error on behalf of the riders.
 
^^
Kings Island operations are pretty awful at times and just because their goals are around that mark proves absolutely nothing. A goal of 1280 is very low. When it comes to rides like raptor magnum and gatekeeper they are all capable of 1600+ and that goes the same for diamondback.
The problem is you are basing things off of the small glimpses of things you've seen from numerous different places and apparently come to the conclusion that it's neither possible or likely for these rides to achieve numbers that high. So im not sure why you're making that assumption from the observations you've made when here is someone who has worked the ride and knows it in detail and is giving examples of the capacity it is possible of.

It's not a matter of me convincing you "we moved this fast" or "we were this good", it's an actual fact I assure you. It actually became easier over time and I'm just saying that gatekeeper is capable of achieving 58 dispatches an hour, which equals 1856. It's all in the numbers mate I would never make this stuff up, I will admit we probably took it far too seriously haha.

Which is an average of just over a minute in between dispatches and it's 35 seconds for your interval time.
Gatekeeper is fascinating in that it has almost a 10 second gap for interval between 35-45 seconds between the time a train stops in the station.

Your said hourly capacities of 1280 for b&m's are more realistic with what you've seen, but that's the thing.
You're basing it on what you've just seen, and rides aren't run perfectly all the time, and more often than not, a parks operations are not good enough to provide these hours. Kings Island for example.
I'm basing things off of what I've seen, learnt and experienced for a full season every day of the season. All 3 train B&Ms (or at least the vast majority with a few expectations) are capable of very high hours such as 1600, gatekeeper even more.

I'm not really sure what else I can say to show you what I'm saying is true.
Do the investigating for yourself if you wish, see how long it takes for a train to leave the station and reach Immelmann (it's about 1 minute), which is the time in between dispatches.
And acceptable time for us to send the train is anywhere between going into the Immelmann and before cresting the airtime hil.
 
I just wanna sorta back up what D1993 is saying from my experiences across the pond from Gatekeeper. I worked at Thorpe Park, and although I didn't specifically work on The Swarm, I of course talked to people who did. The theoretical maximum capacity outlined by B&M was somewhere around 1200 if I remember correctly. A lot lower than Gatekeeper by the sounds of it, but The Swarm only has two trains and no MCBR. The Swarm also normally only has 4 attendants checking restraints, 2 on each side, which is 1 less on each side than what he said for Gatekeeper.

The maximum they've managed to achieve on The Swarm so far was close to 1300, might have been 1296 but I can't remember that specifically, so manufacturer standards are very possible to beat. Thorpe also goes by counting heads rather than trains, although Wingriders actually count the trains you dispatch on the console anyway, so there's no way they could really lie about that.

So yeah, 1800 definitely sounds doable if everything went perfectly. What you have to remember is that that perfect hour happens once a year, the rest are normally a good 10% - 20% slower than that. That's true of all coasters as well. As long as you were getting around 85% of the maximum throughput, you should be reasonably happy.
 
^^ congrats at working for one summer at a regional park. I have worked for companies that have rides like Hulk, Mummy, Rock N Rollercoaster, etc... parks thatpride themselves on capacity. Im not bassing 40 dispatches off ride crews but guests. Youre saying that you routinley have days (not hours) where you get no: disabled guests? No chicken outs? No bags? No false starts or resets? Hard to believe.

For the last time, im sure you guys all got gold stars for working hard.

^ except he is saying they are above perfect regularly. You actually stated something similar to what I said 2 pages back, in terms of what a goal should be. From conversations ive had at iaapa and with other industry designers capacities stated in manuals are usually based off of a minimum interval on dispatch times.
 
^Yeah I've just read back now, didn't realise the conversation on Gatekeeper went that far back, and you said to take around 80% of the theoretical throughput, so fair point there. Pretty similar to what I said.

But it also says that Cedar Point use a turnstyle system to count which to me seems like a pretty silly idea, for all the reasons you mentioned. I don't see why they don't just count the heads of the people on the train? Seems like the most foolproof way. But on the other hand, D1993 is saying he's going by how many trains they sent in an hour and using a full train every time, so obviously there's some leeway there. If they say they sent 58 trains in the hour, I'd say the throughput they hit would be anywhere between 1740 and 1856, a pretty big margin, and closer to 1740 seems much more likely. But again, unless he's just straight up lying, then it's impossible to be wrong about how many trains are sent on a Wingrider as it counts them in the console provided by B&M.

It does seem a little unlikely to hit that target numerous times though. When The Swarm hit its maximum capacity, B&M actually wrote a letter to the operator/attendants working on the ride at that time congratulating them. I could see it as a one off, but not continuous.
 
D1993 said:
Slow? Gatekeeper?
It's quite the opposite. It is all about the parks operations policies and the way in which the ride hosts handle it.
I was apart of the gatekeeper inaugural crew, and quite frequently when we really hauled ass, we would have 1800 hours. This was not a one time thing either, it happened many times over many different days when we were really pushing to move fast.
Click to expand...

Double post then you can respond if you want but I'm done looking at this thread:

"The park's spokesman Bryan Edwards said, "We are giving approximately 1,600 rides per hour."

Assuming "approximately" is right...that is 50 dispatches an hour, which is fantastic. Realistically that is 15%-20% faster than I would expect for an average.

I would imagine, that if the ride was breaking 1,800 as frequently as you have claimed, the spokesman would promote a higher ride total, especially considering 1,600 = -7% below capacity, and PR people love to spin things as positively as possible.
 
rtotheizzo17 said:
^^ congrats at working for one summer at a regional park. I have worked for companies that have rides like Hulk, Mummy, Rock N Rollercoaster, etc... parks thatpride themselves on capacity. Im not bassing 40 dispatches off ride crews but guests. Youre saying that you routinley have days (not hours) where you get no: disabled guests? No chicken outs? No bags? No false starts or resets? Hard to believe.

For the last time, im sure you guys all got gold stars for working hard.

^ except he is saying they are above perfect regularly. You actually stated something similar to what I said 2 pages back, in terms of what a goal should be. From conversations ive had at iaapa and with other industry designers capacities stated in manuals are usually based off of a minimum interval on dispatch times.
Click to expand...

I think there's been a slight mis-communication perhaps on my part, my bad.
In no way is it possible to run the ride (gatekeeper) at full capacity all day long. It requires too much energy and guests are way too stupid (no offence, to anyone who's taking it).
If you were talking about goals as the 'minimum', then we would always aim above 1500 riders an hour. Anything below that and someone would be unhappy (either myself, other crew members or the team leaders).

My original point simply was that gatekeeper is fully capable of achieving really high hours. (1800+).
It wasn't really any official spoken rule, but we used to do these 'power hours', for the last couple hours of the night when we could, especially Saturdays and any busy days. It's not possible to keep up 1800 hours all day long, like I said before it just requires way too much energy because the interval on that ride is insanely short.
It is possible though to do it for certain amounts of time, and we usually did this at the end of the day.
Like I mentioned before our record was 58 dispatches in one hour, however anything within the 50 mark we were happy with.

Brian Edwards, while a very nice guy, knows extremely little about the ride considering he is in marketing and visited the ride about once every 2 months.
I was there 6 bloody days a week haha.
On average, 1600 actually would be very good and acceptable, but definitely not the highest possible.
 
^ I also applaud your crew from last year. At least during my anecdotal visits, you folks were really able to push the load time, and have the trains already staged on the lift hill before the prior had passed through the mcbr.
 
Thanks!
Capacity was definitely one of the most important things on our mind all the time, and that ride was a capacity monster.
B&M's that run 3 trains are such a pleasure to work on. And stand-ups.
 
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