Alpengeist
- Thread starter Zachary
- Start date
Money. They did this same crap last year too.
That was my guess but why? Literally EVERY other ride is open. Someone told me maintenance and I said bs the rides open on the weekends and it's going to be for xmas town. What maintenance lol is that why pantheon didn't open till 9:30pm on wednesday? Lol Was closed the entire night until then
"Maintenance" is still, ultimately, budget, for the record. BGW maintenance is massively underpaid and understaffed. It is possible that it isn't opening because maintenance is stretched too thin on Fridays, but the fix for that is to pay a competitive wage and properly staff the department.
What maintenance even is there besides tearing down and rebuilding the trains? Worst case scnerio take a few days to get 1 done and running and at worst do 1 train ops on the thing for your slower days while you work on the other 2 and get them ready for xmas town. Longer wait but atleast it's open and the people who paid for full day tickets are getting their full moneys worth. I know easier said than done though im sure.
It is operations decision to not run alpengeist. The maintenance resources are there.
Daily inspection on a coaster is a full shift of work. Sometimes 6-8 hours if nothing goes wrong. An annual teardown and rebuild on just one train takes at least a month.
Yeah, they gotta take the entire train apart, inspect the pieces, replace what needs to be replaced, and rebuild the entire train.
Ugh, don’t let the BGW shills on Facebook gaslight you into thinking it’s your fault. Checking the ride pages on the park’s website before you visit is not a normal thing to do, should not be expected of guests, and is not something the vast majority of guests will even think to do.
The expectation should always be that, when the park is open for regular operation and guests are paying to be inside, all the rides that they reasonably can open should be open. That was the norm for decades. The idea that you need to check the ride listings before each visit to see what’s open is not normal. Don’t let anyone try to convince you otherwise.
It’s also not easy to understand this from looking at the website. The homepage makes no mention of limited operations on weekdays. It’s buried, requiring you to have enough foresight to consider that things might be closed and then look into it. This can only be the result of laziness by the park (an absolute lack of focus on transparency and a good guest experience), or they’re deliberately trying to hide their reduced operations so people still come and spend money. The pessimist in me suspects the latter, but both explanations are unacceptable.
He also went on to say "most regional theme parks do not operate every ride everyday, especially low volume days. I said thats complete bs, sure an actual reason (broken, maintenence) but not just because it's a slow day.
Someone mentioned maybe its hard for them to staff it during the week? Surely not. Iv'e seen a ton of extra workers in apollo the last 2 nights just standing there talking. Like atleast 4 people inclusing the ride ops
And, like with maintenance, once again, even if you grant these people that it is a staffing shortage problem (very unlikely IMO, but to grant it for the sake of argument), that is still, ultimately, an issue of money. Until BGW pays ride operators running down trains, pushing down restraints for 8+ hours a day the same amount as the people working the register at the McDonald's down the road (where the hours and benefits are also far superior, I might add), nothing at BGW can be honestly assigned to an issue of "staffing shortages."
That is a BS excuse from that guy. People paying full price expect a full price experience. If any park can't deliver full experience, then the tickets should be discounted accordingly. Exceptions would be due to weather, mechanical or wasps.
Nah lets build 3 coasters and a flat ride in the span of 5 years instead.
lol 9 coasters by the way
Gyazo
gyazo.com
Last edited by a moderator:
But it can be attributed to corporate’s unwillingness to provide a bigger labor budget and therefore hire more staff.
Oh, and the constant labor hour budgets being so strict they won’t let the people who want hours work, but barely schedule other people.
The issue though maybe isn't fully the hours of work.
Maintenance budget also includes the tools those employees use. The parts they get. The shipping time. All of that stuff.
My biggest issue with a ride being closed during the week is actually far different that a lot of what you all are going after of the pay front. My issue is more that BGW is opening on days they know aren't highly profitable so there's little motivation to pay anyone more because it's not that busy. I know I don't have access to attendance records and who and what the breakdown of people coming in are but that to me is the core of the issue.
Like, you can think of it like this. Pass holders my be BGW's biggest revenue stream, but in the end, for the amount of labor they incur the park they aren't really contributing a lot cashflow wise. So if I'm the park, and I know I need to bank the money from the weekend (for the sake of this argument) to make payroll during the week (again I know it doesn't work this way) because you have less actual paying guests in the park, then I have 3 options to making that payroll money "stretch". (1) I can just close down random rides, (2) I can offer lower wages, or (3) I can run with bare bones staff.
Unfortunately for BGW they picked to do all three at the same time. Realistically if this is the case, based on payroll hours, then they should close on the weekdays. Take the money that you would spend there and reallocate it in a variety of ways:
~ Pay the maintenance team more so you get good skilled workers in there.
~ Pay a full time staff more so they care about their jobs.
~ Put more staff hours in on the weekends with part time or load your full time staff with something like 3 10-hour shifts, and for the final 10 hours of their full time, have them in on off days to clean/maintain/work on the rides.
Although much smaller scale, for years I worried about budget hours and payroll like this. When I realized the best thing to do in my spot was something crappy, of cut off cart usage early 2 days a week, so me as the full time salary person that had to be there anyways did their job, so I could have the hours to pay 2 people to work the cart barn on weekend mornings, I did it. I feel like that's what BGW is missing here. In an effort to open as much as possible to scrap every penny they could, they are missing out on far bigger profits right now by having less operating hours and shifting the labor hours to that.
Taking my meager work with it and expanding to a full park size, I could see where those employees tasked with Alpie might be shifted to another area of the park where their labor hours could go further in terms of making the park feel 'more open'. EG - Run Alpie using 32 labor hours (4 people on 8 hour shirfts) or open Wirbelwind (1), Roto Baron (1), and Autobahn (2) for those same labor hours. So basically my argument is take those labor hours from a random Wed/Thur in a time where you aren't going to make as much money and overlap them with the 48 labor hours (6 people) you had for a weekend day. Or better yet you can only move 2 of those people and account the extra 16 labor hours to maintenance to do work on the off days so it's actually completed.
Sorry for the rant there, but IMO the more I see this going on, there's just as much going on with the allocation of resources as there is with the spending of money.
The teardown question was already addressed above, but more broadly I'll add that every ride comes with a thick and detailed maintenance manual.
As roller coasters are highly engineered pieces of industrial infrastructure that carry people and do dynamically weird things with them, they feature a ton in their manuals pertaining to the acceptable operating condition of the hardware for both its own longevity and the achievement of nearly-perfect human safety. What is every single thing on or around the ride that ever gets visually scanned, checked, measured/inspected, changed, emptied, filled, rotated/cycled, thrown out, or overhauled? What has to happen multiple times per day? Daily? Weekly? Biweekly? Monthly? Bimonthly? Quarterly? Semiannually? Annually? How do you do it all the right way? It's all in there with full procedures, parts lists, instructional diagrams and specs for virtually everything. Much is manufacturer-standard and some can be custom to a certain park. The instructions and considerations and diagrams can run into the hundreds of pages, real or digital, and that's a separate count from the operations manual (which sometimes comprises additional pages in the same document) and the primary collection of technical drawings (which probably is delivered separately).
Foundations? There are procedures. Restraints? There are procedures. Wheels and bogeys? There are procedures. Train structure. Track connections. Supports. Lift components. Brakes. Motors. The many control subsystems. Operator panel. Station and gates. Procedures, procedures, procedures. Schedules. Specifics. And parts and features. So many parts and features. Every bolted connection. Every weld. Every air gate. Every compressed air tank. Every sensor. Every coupler. This is a very partial list.
The maintenance manual is so critical to a new ride's approval to run and to its subsequent safe operation that not only is its delivery a hard requirement at any major park I have ever been familiar with, but in certain past cases parks have contractually withheld final payment to a ride supplier until the manual was delivered in full, reviewed by park or corporate engineering staff, and verified as acceptably complete.
Oh, and maintenance procedures get updates over time too. Here is a cool little collection of technical bulletins for Nitro, just 4 short ones from 20+ years ago. There are surely many more at this point. These important updates to inspection and service procedures happen all the time based on what a manufacturer sees "in the wild."
Additionally, parks may add their own additional procedures to the manufacturer's specified set. So the notion of a full inspection slate is itself a (slowly) moving target over time.
Crazy essential.
Good god well knwoing all that, then how in the hell is there time to do anything to coasters open year round like verbolten or lochness or anything year round. Once its maintenance time then it's down for quite awhile and can't run at all until it's 100% completed right? How do the year round coasters stay open
They go really fast. Lots of hours in the shop. It takes a lot to run a park year round that was designed to run 7 months a year.
It's been 20+ years since I got this answer - but at one time when I wanted to get into engineering school I talked to the fine people at USO and they have people trained for specific parts or rides, and depending on the labor budget of the park you might even be highly specialized to one ride. So for way back then for Hulk they had 4 people trained on trains alone, 2 on braking systems, 2 on launch, 2 on footers, 4 on track. And they mostly worked overnights on the ride so you didn't see them out there during the day.