Sylvester McBean's Photos Inside!

I think the problem is that it's just not feasible to run. Look at Christopher Levinsky's post. He points out all the potential problems with the ride very well.

Now, is this park cash-strapped? I mean, they haven't added a new attraction since the Kiddie coaster four or five years ago. It doesn't really make sense, but are they? *** Edited 2/20/2005 3:58:51 AM UTC by thepinkdoomofmonkeys***

Disney uses diseal-powered tractors to move any stranded monorail trains to the nearest station in the event of a mechanical failure.

The tractor has been deployed before, and has successfully done it's job- basically- if Disney can do it- why can't Universal have a backup vehicle?

Universal could have some sort of backup vehicle as previousely mentioned to move the stranded cars, slowly to the nearest station. Since the vehicles were intentionally built for a little 'bumping' then it shouldn't be much of a problem. *** Edited 2/20/2005 4:55:31 AM UTC by CoastermanX***

After speaking with an associate of mine, I learned of yet another problem that has plagued McBean: weight distribution. Apparently, this was yet another flaw that was overlooked when the ride was built. Take a look at the support track—it’s barely a foot wide. During mechanical testing of the ride (without people), it was found that the carts were not able to properly balance on the track and even swayed with movement. For test-cars with no passengers, this wasn’t an issue. But put in people and it’s a whole different story. With riders in the cars, there is no way to properly balance out the car on the track. This was yet just another design flaw in the ride.

Sure it could be fixed. Heck, just look at PKI’s Helicopter attraction which operates daily without problems as RTneedsTLC pointed out. However, in the case of McBean, this would most likely call for either a redesign of the track and/or cars. Unfortunately, Universal doesn’t seem too keen to pump any more money into this ride.

-Chris

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Jeff said:
The ground is most certainly not made of foam. Everything else might be, but the midway is concrete.

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While the midway is made of concrete there is a thin layer of the foam type stuff over top of the concrete of the more brightly colored patches. It's only a few millimeters thick, though, so I don't get it.

[Edit: typo]

*** Edited 2/20/2005 5:52:13 AM UTC by Michael Darling***

lets also not forget that if/when they fix the ride it will be a gentle extremely low capacity ride, proably the worst tipe of ride in the industry and likely to cause headaches for the park.

Also not mentioned since the company that built this went bankrupt if the park were to finish it the builder would get a completion payment (or the bankruptcy court would ) that plus the cost to fix all the problems would exceed the cost to build a different ride.That said IOA sure needs a couple of new rides but as long as the park is packed most of the time it will be hard to convince the accountants/business managers that it is in their interest to spend money since the park has just in the last few quarters turned a profit.

Before anyone asks the park has a huge debt load from the initial construction. Also the number of times the park has changed owners hasn't helped in my opinion.

edit for spelling *** Edited 2/20/2005 3:51:53 PM UTC by kevin38***

I really think we've discussed this a few times before...;)

Anyhow, to the very best *guess* that I can give, the main problem is that the ride is NOT able to evacuate safely in case of power failure. Since the ride doesn't *coaster* to a place where it could be safely evac'd (like a normal rollerCOASTER would), and since there's a ton of places behind "Green Eggs", "If I ran the Zoo", etc., where you could NOT get to with the aforementioned "cherry picker device". (recalling discussion of the one stored over by the P. Flyers)...;)

I see that area is called "Sneetch Beach"...proving that I don't know even HALF the stuff about IoA, and I've been dozens of times, LOL...

I imagine that "securing" riders could become an issue as well, since you need to be able to extract people safely, and you need to assume they won't try to extract themselves midway through the ride (Knoebels' ski-lift situations)...

I definitely STRONGLY agree that they should *at the very least* run the thing continuously as an elaborate theming device throughout Seuss Landing...

57 cars x 2 people = Max. of 114 people on ride at one time.

Estimate: 5:30 min. as total ride time, including boarding

57/5.5 = about 11 cycles/car/hour

11 x 2 pass. = about 22 pass/car/hour

22 x 57 = about 1254 pph (with both tracks, all cars running)

1254 pph / 2 tracks = about 627 PPH (one track alone with all cars running)

The capacity isn't too bad, for a ride of it's nature. IOA central says the capacity for The Cat in the Hat is about 1,800 PPH, so the driving machines together have 546 less PPH than The Cat in the Hat. So I don't think the capacity is too bad, however as metioned in previous posts, the ride cannot support many cars, most likely altering the results.

It was running (sans riders, of course) over the holidays a couple months ago. Didn't seem like most people noticed, though ...