State ends investigation of Top Thrill Dragster accident at Cedar Point

Posted | Contributed by Jeff

The Ohio Department of Agriculture announced Friday it has completed its investigation into an incident involving Cedar Point's Top Thrill Dragster. In August, a woman was hit in the head and severely injured by a metal plate that separated from a train on the ride. The investigation showed that a screw appeared to spontaneously break, causing the separation of the plate. The Ohio Department of Agriculture found no evidence that the park violated any laws.

Read more from WSYX/Columbus.

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I still feel like the fact that Kingda Ka and Xcelerator did not even close for one day after this happened shows the parks and/or Intamin aren't concerned about the other rides having the same issue.

Jeff's avatar

As I've said before, I wouldn't be surprised if they were different.


Jeff - Editor - CoasterBuzz.com - My Blog

You're probably right, Jeff. I really wonder why and how they're different, though. Is TTD that different from all the others? RCDB lists 10 other "accelerator" coasters currently operating and of course all but Xcelerator opened after TTD. Were there designs or features that Intamin experimented with on TTD that they decided to ditch before, say, Storm Runner opened a year later? If so, why not retrofit TTD?

I feel like I have more questions now than I did before. Not out of skepticism or anything, just curiosity. I want to know how all these things work, dangit.


Per previous conversations, I have a feeling that it's due to CP's initial effort and the design for trains to move synchronously between the different blocks. Once they realized that was problematic and just not really feasible, no other parks undertook the effort to try to execute that.

Edit: As far as retrofitting, why spend the money changing the hardware? It's more logical to just make minor programming changes to work with the hardware you already had in place.

Last edited by cmwein,

Depending on what the improvement it is, it could end up costing 100s of thousands of dollars to implement. Spending that kind of money to maybe get a slight improvement in operational efficiency probably isn't worth it.

Brent Sullivan's avatar

It wouldn't surprise me if it stays closed permanently. The wait times for this were always the worst in the park especially for such a short ride time.

If it doesn't reopen I can assure you that past long wait times for a short ride cycle won't be the reason.

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