I have it on good faith that several parks are rebuilding their PTC trains. I got a glimpse of this at PKD's opening day as it seems that the bars on Rebel Yell, Grizzy and Hurler had been replaced/refurbished (i.e. strong springs and a new black color-no more orange). Also, notablely missing were the accompaning seat belts. Is this a trend that we can expect across the board or is PKD a special circumstance? If anyone was at Carowinds please say if you noticed this phenomenon on Hurler and Thunder Road down there. T.I.A. jeremy
The springs certainly seemed stronger than last year. I left myself a LOT of room on Hurler, and the bars didn't budge :)
Many parks rebuild their coaster trains every year. And I think Paramount has been running their PTC trains without seatbelts since time immemorial. So the big difference seems to be the black padding on the lap bars. That could be as simple as placing a different order with the injection molding company for re-doing the pads...
--Dave Althoff, Jr.
PKI has never had seatbelts on their PTC cars on The Beast and racer. (The Racer is older than Rebel Yell) Since I haven`t been to PKI this year I don`t know if they got rid of their orange restraints. One thing I know is that often on the racer, they had orange tape on them from where people had picked parts of them off and they hadn`t replaced them. Maybe the new restraints are made out of a harder material.
