As a prior ride op, I could not praise a "quick stop" function enough, and I feel too few rides feature one. There are several reasons you may need to stop a ride, but not the whole ride. Take a wood coaster w/3 sets of brakes, checks, mids, station, running two trains, checks and mids are right behind station. First train is travelling up the lift, second train has left the check and is heading toward the mids. Some stupid GP decides to throw his basketball into the station track area. You obviously do not want to run the ball over with the train, but also don't want to e-stop and cause maintanence & operations to arrive. By hitting a "quick stop" you could stop the train in the mids/lift, get the ball out and resume normal operations.
Had you hit e-stop, maintanence would have came, operations would have came (both had to sign off on an e-stop) and the shutdown would probably have lasted about 20 min.
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Matt--
For that we could hit ride stop, but unfortunately we can't recover from ride-stops either, only lift stops. Even with a ride stop (the same as a quick stop) maintenance would have ot come out and restart everything, granted it wouldnt take as long to recover from as an E-stop.
My personal reaction if an object was in the track area would be to simply not advace the train into the station. The train on the lift would stop per the safety system. Once the track was clear, you can advance the train waiting to come in the station on into the station; and restart the lift and the ride is running as usual.
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I was just using a wood coaster as an example. There are different variations of stop methods and procedures depending on park rules and manufacturers.
Some have the option of a "quick stop" for non-emergency situations. In my example, we would have hit quick stop rather than cause a safety. A safety required maintanence and operations to verify and sign off before restarting the ride. We would also try to stop the train just above the mid-lift block sensors to prevent a safety from occuring, allowing us to bring the second train into the station w/the other stopped on the lift.
I am sure there are many other policies and practices surrounding this type of issue, this is simply what we were doing.
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