Universal Studios Beijing | 2021

[toofpikk]

The ride system at Europa works by the trains being manually driven with remotes to safe evac points. Each train has its own remote, including built in e-stop, and can essentially be driven like a massive hornby train.

There are more evac points than capacity of trains on the ride. It's also a last resort procedure, as the ride will automatically move trains to the nearest evac point during most breakdowns. Most of the time, the ride doesn't even require evacuation. Working on Arthut for 3 months, I saw an evac happen only twice.

Of course, Mack running Europa probably meant they could jump through certain loopholes with the ride design, and were able to do the same on dragon gliders, but I was always curious, say, if there were a fire and a train was stuck right at the centre point of the huge helix, what would the ops do? I imagine this is the kind of scenario that was put on Universal, and there was just no answer. Maybe the available evac points in the prelim design were too far apart, or it was required that due to the nature of the ride, evac needed to be possible from pretty much anywhere, and the quickest solution was to just place catwalks everywhere.

 

[Rein]

That catwalk is a real eyesore, although they try to theme it:



But it already came in handy:


It appears that they still need an extra platform, so why not use a mobile elevating work platform? I can only imagine that they didn't know about local regulations in time... And all the theming budget went into the catwalk

Also, like @Ries noticed, in this onride video (from 1:30), you can clearly see that there would be water underneath the train. I guess that will never happen for the same reason.

4K daytime POV of Jurassic Flyer.

 

[Gavin]

What makes the catwalk thing even weirder is that there was not this same restriction on a similar ride, made by Beijing Shibaolai in Sunac Guangzhou. Different province, different restrictions maybe? Did it somehow slip under the radar? Or maybe it's a newer restriction that doesn't affect older installations?

F**k knows honestly.