Winter Preps

What type of special activities, practicies do parks use to protect their coasters from the harsh winter?  Isn't the wood already treated with a special chemical? 

-Just trying to make the offseason move a little faster(I think).

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Yea the wood is treated.. its called "Treated Lumber" but must be re-treated once a year. (I wonder how many people know that?) I'm not sure if any parks go about doing this or not, so maybe someone could enlighten me. If you really wanna know, I can tell you the difference in lumber, what "Treated Lumber" is treated with.. but this isn't *LumberBuzz* so I'll stop now. :)
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AIM: Pritti Kittie

"Imagine all the people.. living life in peace.." -John Lennon

I really only know what they do at SFoG... they take the trains and cars of the other rides off their tracks or troughs, and they are inspected THOROUGHLY for stress fractures and general wear and tear.  They're then stored somewhere on the premises, and and maintenence that needs to me done is done during the off season.

I would imagine that other parks, especially SF parks, have similar routines.

We use Wolmanized (treated) lumber, and add a coat of Linseed Oil before the paint.  This 3-some alleviates the need for any further treatment. 

Since coasters can't really be "put away" for the winter, we do all we can... remove all  the trains for maintenance and storage, inspect and remove bad or old track sections, etc.

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"Reality" is the only word in the language which should always be used in quotes.

A lot of people think that they just take the trains off and put them in storage, and that is it.  They do so much more.  They take them off, take every part off, clean everything, replace anything that needs to be replaced, then put it all back together again. That is just the trains.

Used to coat the track steel with a heavy grease in the fall to protect it from corrosion. Then we'd scrape it off in the spring. For some reason the EPA frowned upon this practice.