SFNE TR 5/9-SROS Suffers Major Malfunction

SFNE was extremely crowded when we arrived at 2pm. Luckily, I live close by (SFNE is my home park) so I wasn't at a loss. First, they ran out of Fast Pass tickets for the day, which is understandable. Therefore, we had to wait in long lines for everything. SROS suffered a major malfunction, in which the train had just started up the lift and then stopped. This has occurred before, and was usually fixed in 10-15 minutes, so I wasn't worried. After the ride operator told us the ride would be temporaliy shut down, we decided to wait 10 more minutes, maximum, because we had already wasted an hour in that line. After 5 more minutes they asked everyone to exit the queue and started manually releasing the restraints on the train while it was on the lift hill. We returned to SROS later in the day to see what happened. The blue train somehow was gotten onto the transfer track, I'm guessing they un-did the anti-rollbacks and slowly rolled it back down because I never heard or saw the train travel the course ever again that day. Hopefully they will have the problem fixed by the end of this week.

I wouldn't call this a major malfunction. It's happened on our S:ROS at SFA quiet often. I believe it's either a sensor or computer problem.

I can assure you they did not back the train down the lift. The only way it went anywhere was over the hill, whether you saw it or not.

This kind of thing is generally caused by some error logic in the computer. It often sees "ghost trains," where it thinks there is a train somewhere there is not. I suppose that's caused by bad prox switches or bird crap, but who knows. In any case, if it thinks a train is somewhere in the course, or there is more than one train on the lift, it will shut down.

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Jeff
Webmaster/Admin - CoasterBuzz.com

Yes, I realize that, I believe it is called the blocking system. This has happened before, so I am wondering if this has happened before and they can get it working, how coem this time it wouldnt?