Expedition GeForce - Train Failure
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Was posted on another site... Here is a link to a video (sorry for the different language!)
http://www.swr.de/swr1/rp/nachrichten/rheinland-pfalz/-/id=1533608/...index.html
Two more photos here (hit the right arrow to see the second photo)
Ride stalled going up the camel back after the first over bank turn.Injuries reported, but not sure how serious as of yet.
Hmmm.. Interesting. This is a new one for Intamin I believe... Wonder what is the cause of the train failure. Design flaw or lack of maintenance?
Whoa, that is definitely not a valley point! Something must have acted as a strong anti-rollback, my guess would be a broken wheel assembly or something. It could also be the track itself, although that seems less likely.
I'm not familiar with the stop location, but I would assume injuries would be from the sudden halt. Seems like some sort of wheel failure to me.
I think I remember reading somewhere that XGF uses non-intamin wheels the majority of the time to save money and they bring out the good stuff for enthusiast events. Does anyone know if this is true and a possible contributing factor?
I bet people hit their heads on the semi padded grab handle mounted on the back of the seat. It seems with Intamin's design a single wheel failure wouldn't halt a train that bad, I'd imagine a assembly with 3 wheels on it would as the train bottomed out on the track rail!!None the less very interesting
Am I seeing things, or in the first shot of the train, is the third car hanging a little bit off the left side of the track?
I'm the one who mentionned the possibility of them using cheaper wheels to save money. They do on the Vekoma corkscrew (Superwirbel) and seeing how EGF ran like a dumpster when I rode it in 2008, its definately possible. Wanna know the funniest thing? A certain rival website that organise trips rode it a week after and the ride "was back to normal" and "number 1"!
EGF was too much of an investment for this small park. It nearly bankrupted them when they built it and the extra visitors never came. Since Intamin is not cheap when it comes to spare parts and the park is having financial problems...
Raven-Phile said:
Well, that's mildly frightening.
I disagree, I think it shows that secondary safety systems work that the car is hanging to the side but did not fall off.
Doesn't mean it's still not mildly frightening. If you or I were sitting on that train when it ground to a halt, and was hanging off to the side, I find it hard to believe that we'd be discussing the engineering.
I'm glad that it held up and everything worked as it should, but I'd still be a bit shaken.
Think of it this way - cars have airbags as a safety measure. If I were involved in an accident, and they worked as they should, I'd still be scared by the event that triggered them.
Two photos on this link... Very scary... The two cars basically hanging off the track. (also adding to main post).
Thank you Steve. I was not able to view the original link. I would say I'd be a bit freaked out if I were on that particular train. We've seen a lot of weird things happen over the years. Granted the odds of anything happening are extremely low. But, the fact that these occurrences are so rare is what makes them so freaky. Hence the term "Freak Accident."
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Here is a quicker link to that photo
http://www.coaster101.com/2010/04/29/expedition-geforce-derails/
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Intamin is the BMW of rollerocasters. When they work, they work really well. When they break, they BREAK, and they are usually expensive to fix. I would have shat my shorts if I were in that car.
Is it though? Between the locking nuts and redundancy around all of that, there isn't a lot of room for outright failure. Looking at that photo, it's as if the coupling between cars even split. Look at it... you've got LocTite and a locking collar around the nut. Simple visual inspection can catch that.
Jeff - Editor - CoasterBuzz.com - My Blog
I'm not so sure. The car may just be rotated over to the maximum articulation that the cars will allow. These cars ar very similar to Millennium right? Does anyone know the maximum rotation of these trains?
You can see the cars going through a pretty tight rotational radius. I believe the following are shots are all from the same location on the ride.
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Jeff, I don't think you're looking in the right place. I think that joint is one of the two reasons the car didn't just slide off the side of the track.
Looking at the photo, it looks like they lost the right-hand wheel carrier from the third car, which allowed the back of the third car and the front of the fourth car to slide off to the left. The only reason it didn't come off entirely is that the third car is tied front and back to the second and fourth cars.
To me, this looks like exactly the same incident that happened on the Mindbender many years ago. The difference is that on the Mindbender, the wheel carrier that dropped was on the last car, which allowed the car to slide off the track and crash into a post.
Going back to Jeff's Maverick photos, I suggest looking at this one. The most obvious place to look is that bearing right between the road wheels. I do not know whether that vertical arm is welded or if it is held in place by that pin. But I do notice that the piece itself is not rounded, but the end appears to be more or less hexagonal. I wonder if there is a chance that the vertical arm cracked and broke at some point, possibly on a diagonal line running around the pin. Without seeing the actual damage, that would be the first thing I would expect to see. If cracks are propogating inside that metal there would be no way to see them until the part broke. Or, the connection to the car, that large horizontal bearing above the wheel carrier could have failed. If the bolts on the locking collar were at all loose, that would be enough to cause a failure not unlike what we saw on the Michigan's Adventure Chaos.
Hmmm...How long had the park been open to the public when this happened? Is it possible that this was a mistake made in off-season maintenance, as, I suspect to be the cause of the rear axle failure on the Six Flags Great America Demon many years ago?
If I may editorialize for a moment, this is exactly why from a design perspective I much prefer those train designs where the car sits between the rails, with the guide wheels inboard of the rail. I've never understood why designers who put the train entirely above the track, with the guide wheels on the outside, don't also include safety pins to prevent the train from coming away from the rail. Morgan, incidentally, DOES include such safety pins on their coasters, even though they put the guide wheels on the inboard side. And Arrow did include such safety in both versions of their suspended coaster car. B&M, on the other hand, do not.
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