Blog About Queue Design

Basically they take you in through the child swap doors, right? At the IAAPA 2010 social, I rode twice and they made me walk through the whole @#$%! queue both times; I even asked about taking a short-cut for a re-ride.

Last year, when the Potter stuff was under construction, they had you take a bridge from near Mythos that bypassed the construction area and went through the Jurassic Park gate, then you turned to the right and crossed the old bridge which had been repurposed as the Dueling Dragons access path...both entrance and exit, directly into the station.

As for efficiency, I did notice that the Dragons crew was particularly inefficient, but I wonder how much of that is because at the reduced rate at which people were arriving in the station there was no real need to go any faster. Why hurry just so you can send out an empty train? Made for some irritatingly long waits for the front seat, though! But if you were less picky there was no need to wait...just find a seat on the next train.

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

My last day off while working there in '01, I casually walked around the park, taking my time to say goodbye. I spent at least an hour in that queue, touching all of the walls and skulls. When it was announced that they were removing and replacing the themeing of that queue, I was heartbroken.

It really was, in my opinion, the best queue theme ever.

Well damn Travis, you done took it to another level....heh.
I can hear the Green Day song "Wake me up when september ends" play as you gently caress the skulls.

Actually, it WAS kind of like that. lol

Does anyone have an estimate on the capacity for the Potter ride? I was really impressed with the speed and frequency in which the vehicles move through the ride.

delan said:
Well damn Travis, you done took it to another level....heh.
I can hear the Green Day song "Wake me up when september ends" play as you gently caress the skulls.

Well, it certainly wasn't Good Riddance. But I'm sure Travis had the Time Of His Life.

Perhaps he was a Basketcase from all the sadness.

ApolloAndy said:
Perhaps he was a Basketcase from all the sadness.

Just heard that on the radio yesterday on my way to work! The song that introduced me to Green Day..hadn't heard it in quite awhile. Maybe I'll hear it again When I Come Around.

delan said:
"you gently caress the skulls."

So everyone's gonna just ignore that? Hmph.

One of my first bands covered Longview when I was a youngster. It's still one of my favorite songs.

Back in the 1990s, Paramount Parks wanted at least two switchbacks in stations for their new coasters. I can't remember if a study was done, but they believed that the extra time in the station gave riders a chance to get a look at the trains and restraints, and were better prepared to enter the trains in timely manner. This was a simple way to help increase capacity.

I wouldn't buy that. Most stations I can think of like that don't help any more than simply having two or three people in front of me for a particular row. I really think that metering people onto the platform is still the best practice.

I used to have a presentation from a former Paramount Parks engineer that mentioned this. If I can find it, I'll see if it mentioned whether or not this practice actually worked.

WRT Harry Potter--

I have a lousy chunk of video that I shot in the boarding area. It's not very precise, as the camera moved and the clip isn't long enough to show a full interval. But it looks like the interval is about 17-20 seconds, which yields an hourly capacity of between 720 and 850 PPH. The video was shot during the IAAPA social, so I don't know if the ride was running at other than maximum capacity or not. I do know that I am more than a little mystified at the way that ride works. The 20 second interval means the headway between vehicles is much less than that in the boarding area, so I'm not sure how they can bring the vehicles to a full stop for 30 seconds or more not far past the end of the boarding platform...

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

My friend from France did an awesome piece on the Forbidden Journey ride, but its in french, so I can't really post the link on here.

Basically, the ride works like your typical omnimover and the loading station is basically the whole length of the show building, to avoid station stops that would stop the rest of the cars. As for the interval, when the ride runs the 47 "magic benches", its 7 seconds. Amazing, but how do they do it with all those movie screens? Its because there can be 6 benches watching the same movie scene, since each movie scene has 6 screens mounted on a rotating carousel that spin at the same speed the cars move. Theoritical capacity is 2500pph.

Ah. See, that's one of the theories I had about how to make that work but I wasn't able to identify for certain whether the screen was moving or not. It was obvious to me that the vehicles were much too close together to allow one to stop. Now I want to take that tour... :)

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

I saw how this works somewhere on the internet. The benches move along a path around the "screen carousel", keeping a screen in front of it the entire time.

(Looking...) I found it! It can be seen at the 50 second mark of this video.