Maintenance and operating costs *help*

[coasterdude_1]

hey guys,

I'm currently doing a project on the commercial viability of building a rollercoaster. Can anyone give me a ball-park figure of how much it costs to maintain a steel rollercoaster per year. On the same note, operating costs for any steel coasters would be very useful too.

Thanks!

 

[furie]

I doubt anyone can give you massively accurate data, plus, I'll bet even a park couldn't tell you an exact operational cost.

However, you can do a few thnigs to give you some vague ideas.

Do a search to find out how much an engineer would be paid for that kind of work. An experienced engineer I'd say would cost you around £30,000 per annum (very rough).

So you need him/her to start off.

Then you would need somebody to run the actual coaster, depending on the size and complexity it would usually be two or three people, more if you have higher volumes of throughput. I'd give them minimum wage plus about 25%

So I reckon for staffing costs you're at around £50,000 per annum for a pretty complex coaster (PMBO, Shockwave, Kumali kind of scale).

I'll bet that companies will have a rough "cost per dispatch" in their head. This will take into account staff costs plus estimated wear and tear and power. However, I doubt you'll ever find out those figures. I think Alton say it's fair to charge £1500 an hour for them to run Nemesis on ERT - to cover all those costs, but I seriously doubt the ride actually does cost that much per hour.

So, not a great deal of help I'm afraid. I could start pulling figures out of my arse, but it would be sheer guess work. I think wheels for a coaster come in at several hundred pound a piece, so I'd imagine that the yearly costs for a big coaster easily dip into hundreds of thousands, rather than tens of thousands.

Of course, staff costs get split between rides too, one engineer can deal with more than one coaster at a time. So many variables LOL!

Can you define things a little better please?

 

[rollermonkey]

Here's a variable for ya:

I've heard that an Intamin Impulse takes roughly the same amount of electricity to run one cycle as it does do power an average house for about 2 months.

I'm sure that to run the lifthill and brakes on a whacky worm for one cycle would be considerably less.

 

[Pokemaniac]

I've heard that Kingda Ka and TTD each use the same amount of electricity each day as a city with 10,000 inhabitants. I'm not sure if that includes ligths in the queuelines, but that surely doesn't make the big difference.

I guess a coaster with a lift hill is a lot cheaper in that sense. But then again, powering the lift hill can't be the biggest running expense for these.