The Bat at Kings Island suffers a partial derailment. No reported injuries

I'm not sure if linking to a Reddit post is allowed here, but there is a post, with photos, of a wheel coming off of The Bat at Kings Island. The first photo shows a wheel on the ground, second photo shows damage to the track, and the third photo shows the wheel assembly misaligned with the track. No reported injuries.

It's not a derailment is the train is on the rails, in my mind. That's why the wheels are redundant. Still, seems like an unusual failure.

RIP

This is most unfortunate. We are headed down to KI in a couple weeks, and we always look forward to Top Gun/Flight Deck/The Bat.

It doesn't look catastrophic or anything that would keep a typical coaster down for an enormous amount of time, but something like this happening to a breed that is so close to being extinct?

Not optimistic.

What I find interesting is the photo of the ride on what I think is the brake run. The front of the train is still loaded. But the back of the train has all the restraints down but no one sitting there. It's almost as if the back of the train didn't have anyone loaded.

That's one hell of a dent in that track. I've never seen anything like that before.

That it did that kind of damage to the track and still made it back is amazing, but I don't have any context about where it is. If it was that easily photographed, my assumption is that it's either on the last turn or the one headed southeast toward the turn-around. Actually, if it was the right side, it has to be the earlier turn. I think these have the newer iteration of the bogie with a pin sticking inward between the road wheels, right? Not like the older ones with the weird lever that trails behind the wheels.

But again, those axels have locking nuts on them and I think they're marked so a visual inspection would show that failure. I suppose the axel itself could fail, but that seems unlikely.

Issues with coasters have reached a point where I can ask, can we diagnose the cause of the trend? Is it because of reduced maintenance budgets? Is it the echo of the building boom, the inevitable failure boom? Is it just the old guy saying "Coasters never failed at this rate when I was a kid?" Something else? I don't know.

Who said there are reduced maintenance budgets?

I'm interested in the evidence that there is some kind of trend of "issues with coasters".

The wheel almost looks like it was locked up and dragged along the track due to a flat/low spot, before it inevitably popped off. I'm not too surprised the train made the brake run as it carries some impressive speed throughout the whole ride.

Based on the angle of the photo, it looks like the first large turn around over the station. You don't look up towards the track like that anywhere else on the layout from a guests POV, and the wheel seems like it landed next to the road that goes right under the station.

PDXPointer:

Is it just the old guy saying "Coasters never failed at this rate when I was a kid?" Something else? I don't know.

I think it's primarily that back in the day nobody had phones that could immediately post photos/video/written reports to the internet for everyone to see. Unless it was a major incident that brought out the media, stuff like this was never really documented for fan communities to analyze. Stuff like this still happened, but when rides would have random extended downtimes in the middle of the season we just blamed the park on not knowing what they were doing.

When both feet are frostbit from walking in the snow to school, both ways, and your eyes are shot from reading everything by candlelight, you tend to miss a lot of other things.

There was a story from Euclid Beach that involved a station accident on their smallest but formidable coaster, Aero Dips. The train tore up the station platform on its way to its final resting place on the midway, resulting in injuries to the riders.
To avoid unwanted publicity (EB was a “nice place”), the men got together after closing and worked through the night repairing the station. They threw handfuls off dirt in buckets of Euclid Beach Green paint and by morning it looked like nothing had happened. Sure enough the reporters arrived, having heard the news of a horrific accident, and all they found were the guys smiling and leaning on the brake handles.
So not to say accidents haven’t happened all along…

I would have loved for cameraphone video to have been rolling when they accidentally rolled the train off the transfer track on the Geauga Lake Serial Thriller

It wouldn’t be a surprise if this is the end of it

That seems like an over-reaction.

Does it though? Only 5 of the 9 Arrow Suspended coasters are still standing.

And yet somehow New York New York keeps banging along!

That the train was only partially filled is not that surprising. It feels like walking a mile to get to The Bat station, and the crowds at KI have been low recently due to the heat. Most of the older coasters have had station waits on most days.

This seems like a very isolated incident. Unless there is a lot of damage to other areas of the track, I would predict it will reopen in July sometime.