Top Thrill 2 faces extended closure for modification

It has to be exhausting to be that angry about everything.

I know I'd be so exhausted I would tell my staff to pack it in and close up shop early for the day. Especially if there was a little rain.

Getting back to the topic at hand: I have a sneaking suspicion that after doing whatever they were doing to the trains, they discovered that something else needed to happen with the track/supports/whatever, and that is going to require Real Equipment that can't easily be brought in without disrupting park operations.

There is also less then 40 operating days until the end of the season and ordering contractors last minute is expensive. Why spend that much for so little return. People go in the fall to experience the Halloween stuff, which is wildly popular and heavily attended. They don’t need something else to attract people.

A seemingly trustworthy YouTuber that I follow says that the trains are not as light as promised, and the tophat might need extra supports to make up for the extra stress given to it by the faster speeds of the trains going over it. He says that there are cracks on the tophat supports already.

He says that if Intamin would have been chosen to redesign TT2, they would have known how much stress the tophat would have been able to withstand. -Information that Zamperla had to guess at. If the redesigned speed over the tophat doesn't correlate with the weight of the ride vehicles because the ride vehicles weight more than expected, that could be the problem.

super7*:

The blame of this fiasco is 100% on CF management however for choosing such a questionable company with absolutely no experience with this type of ride.

Should have just gone with Intamin and paid the premium.

Well, assuming it was a cost thing, discussions were had, I just don’t know the details of said discussions.

I don’t understand the retconning of Intamin as being the right choice for the job.

LostKause:

He says that if Intamin would have been chosen to redesign TT2, they would have known how much stress the tophat would have been able to withstand. -Information that Zamperla had to guess at.

There's no way that is the case. I'm assuming engineers worked on this project on either end of it and, while it appears the design may have not turned out or worked as intended, there was no guessing going on.

I could be wrong, but I have a feeling I know which YouTuber Travis is talking about, and my impression of him has been that he often talks as if he knows more than he actually does or speculates about things almost as if it’s gospel. Kind of like a lot of enthusiasts do. But take that with a grain of salt because I usually can’t listen to his voice for more than a few seconds.

Yeah, I think the YouTuber is full of ****. Engineering firms don't guess things when human safety is involved.

Cost speculation isn't founded in any reality either. And Intamin? In recent years, the park removed two of their rides and tried to make something out of this one. You'd have to really like pain to go back to them.

Oh yeah, he's usually admittedly full of crap, with his predictions anyway. But I relate to some of the things he does outside of industry news and speculation. I like the guy, but he could be getting this information from social media and not an inside source.

You can just make things up and be president these days. Critical thinking not required.

Commit crimes too

LostKause:

He says that if Intamin would have been chosen to redesign TT2, they would have known how much stress the tophat would have been able to withstand. -Information that Zamperla had to guess at.

As others have said, Engineers don't guess. That said, Zamperla would have had access to all of the design and build documents, CADs, stress tests, etc that Intamin would have provided to Cedar Point in 2003 with their closeout package when TTD was finished. Likewise, all of the structural testing done since 2003 on the tophat would have been made available as well, plus anything else done that was not in the original build. And on top of all that, if there was anything Zamperla still didn't know, they would have just reached out to Intamin. It really is that easy sometimes.

Hmm, anyone else think this might be heading in the direction of Rocket Rods at Disney?

There is a chance that I misspoke, and he didn't say that Zamperela had to guess. Maybe he insinuated it. I can't recall his exact words.

But it is possible that he is right about the trains being too heavy, and that's affecting the rest of the ride. Heavier trains mean more stress on the track due to more forces. Cedar Point has said the trains needed work. This is a pretty logical explanation, if true.

But that might not be true. If I recall correctly, those new Zamperla trains were supposed to be lighter than normal trains. They'd have to be much heavier than expected in order to be heavier than the old Intamin trains?

It feels borderline obvious to me that they simply shaved too much weight from the wheel assemblies in an effort to make the trains as light they could. Do we even need to speculate any more than that? That’s what they’ve been testing. That’s what has all the sensors attached to. That’s where the reinforcements are.

It almost seems like there is a reason everyone had heavy trains and beefy wheel assemblies.

I don't think that outcome was a deliberate design decision in previous products, but rather the lowest possible weight was not a design decision.

The suggestion that the trains are too heavy seems unlikely. The weight was literally a selling point in all of Zamperla's marketing. Looking at the volume of materials, these things are pretty sparse compared to the old trains.

I liken this to the Starliner fiasco. You do all the work, and sometimes there are things that you can't simulate and you have to correct for when you actually build and operate the thing.

I remember it started testing in December because no one could believe a Cedar Point coaster was cycling like a week and a half before Christmas. And I feel that I remember it essentially testing non stop all of March and April.

Were six days of trains filled with live humans that different than months of (I assume) water dummies of varying weight? Or is it coincidence and had testing started a week earlier they would have had to cancel the opening weekend festivities too?