Six Flags Great Adventure announces Jersey Devil roller coaster, the largest single-rail to date

SFoT Gerstlauer spinner is now continuous loading and the difference is huge. CGA's RailBlazer is not continuous loading. They do a great job in dispatching trains in less than a minute, but even in the ideal, that's still 480 pph.

Now that you mention it I remember running across that in St Louis, too.

PhantomTails said:

The ride will have four trains with 12 passengers apiece, so it could have acceptable capacity if operations are good.

Well, the four trains is probably not going to last (Rail Blazer never ran with 3, ever) and it doesn't even matter. If you keep the interval at 1 min. (which is generous unless it's continuous loading) then you're still looking at 720 pph maximum. Given that this is Six Flags, I bet you're topping out at 500 pph on a normal day. The extra trains will almost certainly just sit on the brake run doing nothing.

Agreed. Capacity is gonna blow.

And to all those people claiming that JDC will end up being the better coaster than Orion (and there are a decent amount apparently), I'd still take Orion any day for the capacity. Its going to shred lines.

I consider myself a dreamer, but perhaps someone from RMC will read this...

For better capacity and more excitement, why not offer a ride that has two single rail tracks racing beside each other? You could even somehow load it in such a way that groups of two riders ride side by side, boarding in a similar way they board a normal, two seat across roller coaster. Maybe the train seemingly breaks in half after the station or something.

If I recall correctly, these coasters are less expensive, so two tracks side by side wouldn't be cost prohibitive.

I might have already mentioned this idea in another topic.

I think thats a really great idea. That having said I'm sure RMC would be perfectly able to make something like that if a park were to ask, and the price was right etc.

I don't mean to get conspiracy theoritcal here, but I've read on other sites that Six Flags might actually like the reality of having some lower-capacity, but also very popular (ie. an RMC) rides sprinkled into their offerings to leverage Flash Pass sales.

Again, apologies if thats rather far-fetched. But I mean hey, naturally the longer the wait is for one of the park's top rides, the more one would enticed by pay-to-cut.

For instance, you typically don't need Fast Lane to get on Fury, Leviathan, and soon-to-be-Orion easily, and those are/will the be marquee attractions in their respective parks.

Millennium Force gets incredible throughput too .... Steel Vengeance on the other hand....

It is incredibly asinine to suggest that Six Flags is intentionally building low capacity rides to sell Flash Passes. Why? Because they run the vast majority of their rides at reasonable capacity when they could easily take trains off or limit hours to decrease capacity. If they really wanted to destroy their own capacity, they would be running single train or limited hours on all their rides. However, they do not.

LostKause said:

I consider myself a dreamer

But, your heart's of gold?

I do like the idea of a racing single rail, that is together on the lift, and "splits" at the top - that's good old fashioned RCT stuff right there.

I was thinking more of, "You may say that I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one."

I don't want credit for the idea. I just want to see it happen! I wish I owned a park. I'd get them to do it.

About pay-to-cut... Nope. Not going to start talking about that here.

ApolloAndy said:

Six Flags <snip> If they really wanted to destroy their own capacity, they would be running single train or limited hours on all their rides. However, they do not.

The day we turned around and left Kennywood without riding anything they were selling single ride VIP (cut the line) passes to Steel Curtain for $20 each and running a single train.

If that's not a cash grab, I don't know what is.

And before you go saying "Steel Curtain had a lot of maintenance issues and could only run single train" remember that when Steel Vengeance has the same problem, Fastlane was removed from the ride altogether.

For the record, we wanted to buy VIP passes, but they were sold out for the day. This was our only visit and we decided to pass.

I do think that rides suffering major issues and/or running less trains should be removed from virtual queue and skip the line programs. I have no issues with buying them, but only if it is worth it and only running one train on a new or popular ride typically isn’t worth it.

I can't speak for what a park does WHEN a coaster is running at low capacity. I think it's absurd to imagine that a park intentionally lowers the capacity first.