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

BrettV:

Unless it was a major incident that brought out the media

That's a pretty low bar. The computer stopping a loaded train on the lift hill is enough to bring out the news helicopters.

The Bat DOES have the giant safety pin between the road wheels; it's worth noting that safety pin is NOT attached to the wheel carrier, but rather to the axle assembly which holds the wheel carrier. The single point of failure is the pin that attaches the wheel carrier to the axle, and that is backed up by the safety pin. What happened here was the loss of one of the road wheels.

It's not the first time Kings Island has dropped a wheel from a coaster. King Cobra lost a wheel in its opening season and actually did derail. Vortex lost a guide wheel and bounced into the station. I think Vortex might have once lost an axle as well, but I am not sure of that one.

Arrow's designs are extremely robust in terms of being fault tolerant, and I suppose you might say "bullet resistant". That the train returned to the station and no one was injured was not a matter of luck or good fortune; that train was designed to "tolerate" a failure like this one.

I wonder if they caught the failure before they loaded the other train.

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

With as slow as the lift hill is I would assume that they were able to stop the next train before it made it to the top.

Even if they dispatched, it's likely still only about 3/4 of the way up. They've got some time.

The lift is slow due to blocking. They can dispatch the train and the lift controls the rest. Full speed (or resume motion) happens once the previous train goes past the brake run. When the coaster was announced they said it would run 3 trains. That never happened, clearly, and they only ever had two trains.
I wasn’t there, but my guess is if the damaged train was sitting on that brake the other train was still in the station or it stopped on the lift.
I’ve always wondered if the park was sorry about the placement of the ride. It straddles the ravine rather perfectly but it’s so far away it’s not hard to imagine the area filled with other rides and attractions. SoB filled that need for a minute, at least in terms of queue and station.

Pagoda Gift Shop:

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.

On my visit two weeks ago there was a decent line for The Bat (back to just past where the SoB queue switchbacks used to be) but there were constantly empty rows every train despite that. Surprisingly enough it seemed that every other ride having a grouper had conditioned the guests to stop at the station entrance even though there was no grouper there, which absolutely blew my mind as I don't think I've ever seen that kind of unprompted orderly behavior out of a line of guests entering a station before. There were some near us in line that recognized that hey, there's no grouper so we don't have to wait out here and continued filling the station a bit, but by the time I got off the ride I was watching as I walked away and the crowd was back to bafflingly waiting for a non-existent grouper to send them into the station.

Florida grouper > Ohio grouper.

The Bat throwing a wheel > Rip Ride Rocket

Cajun Grouper with Fruit Salad

More likely to find carp than grouper in Cincinnati, I think.

Walt S:

It's almost as if the back of the train didn't have anyone loaded.

I was at Kings Island Wed-Fri, and having ridden The Bat as our first ride on Wednesday night when we arrived, and experiencing no waits (outside of Flight of Fear), this is pretty accurate to how things looked when we were there.

Word on the street is that it's back open.

FWIW, queue-times.com is reporting a 5min wait currently.

Did some research. It is still down and has remained closed the entire time. The queuetimes app is not accurate sometimes.

Not accurate sometimes is being generous, it's most of the time in my experience.

Been to a handful of (big/popular) parks this year (SFMM, BGW, Dominion, SFFT, etc...) and have checked the site at various times/places and they are usually wildly incorrect. I'll literally be walking onto the ride without a wait and it shows 45 minutes, or vice versa where it's posted at 10-15 minutes, just moments ago, with 1hr+ waits.

Good for a rough congregate estimate of things in a specific park, but not really great for narrowing in on specific rides.

For at least the Cedar Fair parks, I think queue-times.com pulls its data directly from the Cedar Fair apps (or more accurately the API behind the apps). For Kings Island, the wait times have been fairly inaccurate for years. It would not surprise me at all if the official app listed The Bat as having a 5 minute wait by mistake. When I was at the park about 2 weeks ago, the app said Diamondback was down for at least an hour after it had started operating again.

To be fair, that is a lot of data for the park office to process if they don't have an electronic way for the ride operators to report it. My guess is they still rely on phone calls for reporting, but I don't really know.

I believe you're correct about CF and queue-times, Pagoda. I'd be kind of surprised if larger parks/chains didn't implement some type of SCADA system to monitor uptime, downtime, cycletimes, etc. for all of their rides. Whether that gets tied to their wait-times API, who knows.

But I could easily see where mistakes are made, hence why I started my previous post with "FWIW."

That's correct. When in the park I've looked at the app vs Queue Times and have seen no difference. The refresh even seems the same. CP app/ QT is pretty accurate with opened/ closed rides since those have to get called in as soon as they happen and the office seems to process those quickly. The wait times are generally okay but can be a crapshoot.

To me an ideal system would have a cameras on the queue with software/AI which can sense the line length or how many people are there. You'd then have a camera or sensor which tracks dispatch intervals. With that data you can get a pretty accurate projection automatically. Not much value in terms of ROI though so we'll probably see these cheap systems.

You're making it too complicated.

Two turnstiles (or other form of people-counter), one at the queue entrance, one at the ride platform. That tells you how many people are waiting in line. Divide by the ride's average throughput, and you have an accurate-enough measurement. To make it more accurate, count the dispatches and constantly recalculate the throughput. Or to avoid connecting to the ride, add a third turnstile to the exit so you also have a count of how many people are riding or about to ride; the changes in that number will indicate the throughput.

Two people counters and a Raspberry Pi 0W at each ride, you could probably build it with off the shelf components for under $250. Since you don't really need to use people counters (just need a pulse every time someone passes) it could be even cheaper. Most expensive component is probably the twisted pair wiring between the optical switches and the controller. Wire has become ridiculously expensive recently.

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

"Two people counters and a Raspberry Pi 0W at each ride, you could probably build it with off the shelf components for under $250." If you can build it with the Pi 0, maybe $250... But if you use the Pi 4, it'll be $1000 and available in 2024 or so... Darn supply chain... :-)