National Lampoon's Vacation

You have to remeber with Whizzer this is Schwarzkopf we are talking about. He designed rides for fairs with obscene amounts of blocks and trains and trains with no restraints.

For Collusus to ever run with 5 trains per side the dispatch interval woudl have had to have been sub 15 seconds which is completely and utterly impossible.

With 3 trains per side Gemini's interval is 27 seconds and I doubt we will ever see it run 3 trains a side again after this year thanks to the air gates that are on their way.

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If given the choice I'd choose a hamburger over a hotdog anyday of the week.

Wow, CP installing que gates on some of their coasters now?!! I remember when they said that those things were just something else to maintain, and that they didn't feel they were worth the extra hassle. Must of had a change of heart or insurance company policies. My how things change.

Wood - anything else is an imitation

Why would the dispatch interval be shorter than the Whizzer when the Whizzer is a shorter ride? The only thing I could think of would be that one of the blocks was really large or something (this is all moot of course if Colossus doesn't have 8 blocks)....

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"I go out at 3 o' clock for a quart of milk and come home to my son treating his body like an amusement park!" - Estelle Costanza

I believe they are being mandated by state law. But I could be wrong. Almost all of CP's coasters now have them.

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If given the choice I'd choose a hamburger over a hotdog anyday of the week.

You also have to remember that although Whizzer has 5 trains, each of those trains hold far fewer people than say, your standard Colossus train.

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Is that a Q-bot in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?

Not really. Each Whizzer train has four cars of three rows capable of holding two per row. If they would have really wanted to push capacity like a german fair they would have forced two per row. That gives you the exact same number of people as a 4 car three bench PTC train.

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If given the choice I'd choose a hamburger over a hotdog anyday of the week.

My mistake, I thought they were two-car trains.

But still, 5 per side is probably not correct. And I have another zany theory to propose. If the ride ran 5 trains, there would have to be a pretty nice control system installed to monitor brake counts and blocks and so on. It seems unusal that this ride would have such a controller when it was built (late 70s). Heck, GASM ran fully manual up until the 90s. If this ride was fully manual when it opened, that would be hell on any operator to monitor 5 trains on one circuit.

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Is that a Q-bot in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?

Well CP's Cedar Creek Mine Ride ran with 5 trains manually up to the 90's when a computerized system was installed.

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If given the choice I'd choose a hamburger over a hotdog anyday of the week.

Actually, it ran 5 trains until the unload station was put out of comission. That was before the 90's if I'm not mistaken.

An electronic system, which allowed only two train op, was installed sometime after (or when) the unload station left us. A new computer system was installed just a few years ago, allowing three trains to run again.
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- John
I snap flyers.

I don't know if I'm the only one that has noticied this, but the initials for Wally World (WW) are the initials for Magic Mountain (MM) upsidedown. Just an observation.

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--Joe

"Keep all arms and legs, and anything else you would like to come back with, inside the ride at all times."

Actually I believe they ran with up to 4 trains after they took out unload. I don't think they were ever forced to run with only 2 but I have been wrong many times before.

Edit: This is from Dave Althoff's May 21, 1996 CP trip report

I took a ride on Mine Ride, and noticed that all of the trains are actually coupled together...even Train #1, which was sitting on the storage track. The operators noted that they now have four fully-functional trains, and the fifth train is "almost" fully functional. But when I asked if they intended to run the ride with four, the tower operator replied that they (meaning the crew) are not permitted to do that. Of course, that day the crowd was light enough that it was a walk-on with only two trains running...brakes off with the last two cars roped off. This still has the old control panel on it...the operator "drives" the train into the station by hand.

I know that was before the new system was installed and apparantly they coudl run at least 3 at that time.

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If given the choice I'd choose a hamburger over a hotdog anyday of the week.
*** This post was edited by MagnumForce 8/2/2003 1:56:52 PM ***

Great, now I've gone and confused myself again with the help of MineRideForce (again).

Paging Dave Althoff... Paging Dave Althoff... you've left your lights on... er... we need your memory.

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- John
I snap flyers.