Disney Skyliner Accident Part 2

This will almost certainly get converted into news eventually, but Disney Twitter is abuzz with reports of a second Skyliner collision in the Hollywood Studios station. I've been around a LOT of ski lifts and I've never heard of a gondola or detachable colliding in station. I'm sure the spur for disabled guests complicates things, but two collisions in a year is pretty bad.

I saw a tweet reporting it being back in service less than 90 minutes after one reporting the accident, so it must not have been all that bad.

Yeah, looks like a non-event. As best I can tell, a gondola on the ADA loading spur got pushed up against one on the regular loop, neither one loaded.

Interesting. I heard there was broken glass which would have led me to believe it was more serious. Are the gondolas in the spur manually pushed around? Was the resolution “Hey CM, don’t push them into each other again?” I assume if it were some system problem it would be down a lot longer.

One of the windows did shatter.

Disney does respond to stuff like this in quite a unique way, I dare say if the exact same event happened at some other parks/chains, they would not reopen in the space of a few weeks, let alone 90 minutes.

I wonder if there's some kind of manual step in moving gondolas on and off the other rail. Of course, there could be some kind of manual mode, too, like any other ride.

What I find surprising about that link is that they have a Doppelmayr tech on the scene immediately. Do they have a Florida base, or is this just a coincidence that they were there for something else?

I suspect they have an exclusive maintenance contract with people on-site. It's kind of like Mears operating a bus fleet, I suppose, only in this case, the capital expense is still on you.

Rick_UK said:

One of the windows did shatter.

I dare say if the exact same event happened at some other parks/chains, they would not reopen in the space of a few weeks, let alone 90 minutes.

Who knows? Remember Steel Vengeance opening day? Of course they re-opened with one train so not exactly the same, but I was surprised even that happened.

Remember when one of the Superman: Ride of Steel coasters (I forget which one it was, but I think it was Riverside) had a collision, and while Six Flags did close down all three rides, by the end of the day not only were the other two back open again, they were running both trains with no changes? That’s what happens when the cause of the failure is really obvious. The investigation takes about ten minutes, the problem gets fixed, and life goes on again.
I do wonder how these gondolas run through the stations. I confess the only detachable gondolas I am really familiar with are the Von Roll 101’s (which are now technically a Doppelmayr product if I remember right) and those things are constantly banging into each other. I’m surprised the modern ones aren’t designed for a similar level of contact even if the system is designed to prevent it...I wouldn’t expect a minor collision to break the windows.
—Dave Althoff, Jr.

If these made contact in line with each other, it would likely be fine. The contact here had one on the mainline turn around, the other on the straight feeder from the ADA loading. If they were in line, it would be frame to frame contact.

...And the few, not very useful photos I have seen suggest they actually do have bumpers at the bottom of the gondola. This is a system I know very little about, but at the same time it's a system I think makes great sense for the WDW resort!

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

They move pretty close to each other in the stations, so I'm sure they're built for some direct contact, especially on their storage tracks. But even in the long turn station at Riviera, for example, they get pretty close.