One Wild wild wild wild ride
You guys are so stupid its amazing! I worked on son of beast last year and I spent many, many hours driving the damn thing. The driver has a button to hit for every empty seat, the computer counts 'em up and we record it at the end of the day. Its a real brain teaser huh
It is obvious that none of you have ever worked on a coaster before (except sob guy). I am on the Top Gun/Son Of Beast crew this year, and was there when it happened. None of the coasters have turnstiles. We have a computer on every coaster that records how many people and trains were sent every hour, then makes a daily total and adds it to the year-to-date total. The person in the drive box counts every empty seat of every single train and enters it in the computer by pushing the "vacant seat counter" once for every seat. Every coaster at PKI uses this method. The reason it took so long to reach a million riders is that the ride is designed for three trains, but for some reason they will only let us run two, so our hourly capacity is only 650-800 people. To put this in perspective, the line for Top Gun is usually 10 min and SOB 45 min, but Top Gun has a greater capacity because Gun runs around 29-34 trains per hour, whereas SOB runs 22-26. Although there was no way to point out the exact millionth rider, our capacity system is accurate enough that we were able to tell the train that the millionth rider was on.
