Parks in the Winter

Ok. I know that I know nothing about park operations, but why do they leave the cars for the rides (rollercoasters) in the outside on the walkways in the winter season. Good example on PointBuzz, they have pics of Cedar Point during the winter and the cars are just right next to the ride covered in snow. Why is that?

Where do you suggest they put them? It's not like they have enough indoor storage for them all. I can only speak of Cedar Point, but they enclose several picnic pavilions and rotate groups of vehicles in for maintenance throughout the off-season.

B&M & Intamin are Swiss; Vekoma is Dutch; GCI is in PA, S&S is in Utah; Change-Morgan is in Kansas...the list goes on and on. My point is all those companies are from places with cold winters so the trains are used to sitting outside in the cold. In fact they get angry when you put them somewhere warm ;)

mOOSH [yes, that was sarcasm]

I'm sure Breakers has some empty rooms this time of the season. They could give some good discounts to the trains. Then again I'm sure if Maggie, Millie, and Draggie trains got together it could be one big drunkfest remembering when each was the tallest in the world!

Speaking for SFSTL, a lot of the coaster trains actually stay at their stations and transfer tracks for a majority of the winter. I think they actually take turns rotating them out into mainteance sheds to gut them. It is not as if extreme cold will hurt them or snow as they get rained on all the time. Most are covered anyway to prevent potential moisture damage while they are not being worked on. To add to things besides coaster cars, panels and certain electrical equipment are protected in some way either by removing them, or even by plastic wrap. Trash cans and benches all have their certain homes for the winter, mostly under a roof. Its so sad to walk through an empty winter baren park, so quiet and still yet kinda cool too to see things going on. *** Edited 2/25/2005 6:50:20 AM UTC by Boz773***

At CP they stack the cars out on the midways so that they can pick them up with the forklift. It's much easier to manuever with them outside and not stacked in a building or pavilion.

Well, they could put them in the underground labrynth beneath the parking lot.
my bad, wrong park...

By leaving the coasters on the tracks all winter don't they stand a chance of flat-spotting the wheels? Wouldn't that make for a rougher ride?

Its possible but most parks would buy new wheels if they HAD to leave them on the track.

The wheels on the Dragster trains, and come to think of it the Millennium Force trains, are a ridiculously harder substance than those found on any of the Arrow rides. I don't know what Intamin is specifying these days, but it's not the stuff that shipped on the original Millennium Force wheels.

They take all of the trains off of the coasters at WOF and store them in the maintenance building where they get torn down every off season. Granted we have fewer coasters than most parks, but consider 3 trains for Mamba, 2 for Timber Wolf, 1 for Boomercrap, 1 for Wacky Worm and then the 6 cars for Dragons, that takes up a lot of room. Not to mention they also tear down several of the flat rides each season (Octopus, Scrambler, etc.) and take the cars off the rest (Zulu, Skyliner, Dutchman, etc). Thank goodness the maintenance area is rather large. :)

coasterpunk said:
I'm sure Breakers has some empty rooms this time of the season. They could give some good discounts to the trains. Then again I'm sure if Maggie, Millie, and Draggie trains got together it could be one big drunkfest remembering when each was the tallest in the world!

Am I the only one who found that hilarious.

I guess so ;)