Stupid people leaning on them, or intentionally breaking them
Apollo's Chariot
- Thread starter Zachary
- Start date
Have you never met people? If there's a way to break something they'll find it...
No sure why your comment got an eye roll but the careless attitude of others property exhibited by so many people these days my mind went right to this too. Either someone leaned on it or someone kept pushing and pulling on it.
Aluminum is not a strong metal. As a former operator of Apollo, this attempt to split the Queue pisses me off too. Back in the day the whole path way was open.
I was eye rolling at the dumbasses in the world who would find a way to break something like this, not at the guy who wrote this
We personally think the single rider line and quick queue lines here should be switched. But don't know how long the line for single riders would be if it was on the exit side? What do you think
The Apollo Single Rider line has been notoriously under utilized. I prefer quick queue going to the exit because there’s gonna be more people using that than single rider.
Eliminate the damn rope from the main queue.
Go back to the drawing board and actually spend a couple thousand dollars to properly think through these queues.
All these issues go back to cost-cutting, and finding the cheapest way to make a solution and then blaming guests when those cheap solutions get broken easily. It’s pathetic.
The cost of parts and labor for installing the rope in the main queue would have cost a couple of thousand dollars. The cost of engineering and installing a walkway, will cost many thousands of dollars.
If I were making the decisions, I would eliminate the single rider line, use the existing queue for both regular and quick queue. To make loading faster, I would have an station entrance attendant on all but the slowest of days so the operators checking g restraints don't have to hold a train up for 45 seconds every time they want to measure anyone. They also could limit the station to about eighty riders behind the gates (just over two trains), and allow quick queue to chose any row they want.
The reason I would eliminate the single rider line, is because if I were calling the shots, the ride would be running three trains on any day the line gets longer than ten minutes. Unless all the rows are being pre-assigned before the gates open, a single rider line will most likely reduce capacity by slowing down dispatches. (With two train operation it can be usefull due to the ride having such a long cycle time.)
To make running three trains possible year round, I would buy a fourth train, allowing three to be operational most of the time. This would also allow for a running spare during two train operation. [Yes I know I am proposing to spend a million dollars, despite saying a new enteance boardwalk was too expensive.] One downside to having four trains is that the train being rebuilt will have to be removed from the track, as there are only three service bays. Currently I believe that the trains are rebuilt in the service/storage bays.
For better or for worse, I am not in a position to make any such decisions.
If I were making the decisions, I would eliminate the single rider line, use the existing queue for both regular and quick queue. To make loading faster, I would have an station entrance attendant on all but the slowest of days so the operators checking g restraints don't have to hold a train up for 45 seconds every time they want to measure anyone. They also could limit the station to about eighty riders behind the gates (just over two trains), and allow quick queue to chose any row they want.
The reason I would eliminate the single rider line, is because if I were calling the shots, the ride would be running three trains on any day the line gets longer than ten minutes. Unless all the rows are being pre-assigned before the gates open, a single rider line will most likely reduce capacity by slowing down dispatches. (With two train operation it can be usefull due to the ride having such a long cycle time.)
To make running three trains possible year round, I would buy a fourth train, allowing three to be operational most of the time. This would also allow for a running spare during two train operation. [Yes I know I am proposing to spend a million dollars, despite saying a new enteance boardwalk was too expensive.] One downside to having four trains is that the train being rebuilt will have to be removed from the track, as there are only three service bays. Currently I believe that the trains are rebuilt in the service/storage bays.
For better or for worse, I am not in a position to make any such decisions.
BGW maintenance may tell you yes, but the answer is also definitely no.
BGW maintenance would probably say that the extended operating season doesn't allow them enough time to refurbish full sets of trains entirely outside attractions' operating seasons.
That is almost certainly correct, but it also ignores another lever BGW refuses to touch entirely—staffing.
In reality, BGW's attractions could all operate at full capacity despite the inflated operating calendar if BGW/PRKS was willing to staff up maintenance to a level where the work becomes manageable within their newly narrowed time allotment. This should be priced into the expanded operating calendar, but it has not been. BGW has opted to cut the guest experience to extract additional profits rather than appropriately fund their extended operating schedule.
In fact, as BGW's calendar has gradually expanded, BGW maintenance has slowly been cut back—stretching the department thinner and thinner. Some of this is the result of budget and staffing cuts, but recruitment has also been a problem due to BGW's general unwillingness to raise pay to be commensurate with the industry for the experience and expertise required.
Furthermore, in many cases, it's unclear whether or not BGW should even push to get more trains running on their coasters because, oftentimes at BGW, the number of trains isn't the root of the capacity issues, the embarrassingly poor operations are. Operations at BGW are the result of a corporation that has completely deprioritized capacity, provides poor base pay, offers little to no incentive for quality work, and actually directly profits off of the length of attraction queues.
So yes, most attractions don't have all of their trains operational all season anymore meaning that running them all is often an impossibility—but there are other barriers that also make doing so impractical or unlikely as well—and until BGW is willing to prioritize capacity and fund better, more efficient operations and maintenance, this won't change.
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So @Zachary your comments on operations made me thing of this little antidotal story from one of my last BGW trips and Apollo specifically.
The line was rather long that day and I observed in 3 straight trains:
- Front row go out with 2 and no effort made to pair up anyone, and 4 trains later (my ride) there was another two in front alone.
- One dispatch is 3:00 because for about the first minute to 90 seconds a group of teens were too into their phones to notice the gate was open and it took until someone checked restraints to notice a row was empty.
- Train before me had a row with 1 person in it, the row in front of them had 2, then when I got on, the row with 1 person in it had 4, and the row with 2 got another single.
That shows how terrible operations are but also how people play into the issue. Why did no one speak up in these situations to help fill the trains (which the queue was in the overflow for)?
I always noticed those type of issues (multiple partial rows that could be infilled) happens on Apollo. Contrast that with my last Hershey visit with a friend and waiting for Great Bear. Before loading the Ride Op asked us how many (IIRC we were at row 5), and after they went through they asked the group behind us how many (they were 4), and they directed us to go to row 2 to pair up with another twosome, and the group behind us to still board on row 5. And that was with the bare minimum 5 they need to operate.
The line was rather long that day and I observed in 3 straight trains:
- Front row go out with 2 and no effort made to pair up anyone, and 4 trains later (my ride) there was another two in front alone.
- One dispatch is 3:00 because for about the first minute to 90 seconds a group of teens were too into their phones to notice the gate was open and it took until someone checked restraints to notice a row was empty.
- Train before me had a row with 1 person in it, the row in front of them had 2, then when I got on, the row with 1 person in it had 4, and the row with 2 got another single.
That shows how terrible operations are but also how people play into the issue. Why did no one speak up in these situations to help fill the trains (which the queue was in the overflow for)?
I always noticed those type of issues (multiple partial rows that could be infilled) happens on Apollo. Contrast that with my last Hershey visit with a friend and waiting for Great Bear. Before loading the Ride Op asked us how many (IIRC we were at row 5), and after they went through they asked the group behind us how many (they were 4), and they directed us to go to row 2 to pair up with another twosome, and the group behind us to still board on row 5. And that was with the bare minimum 5 they need to operate.
Apollo's chariot was operational last night and might be reopening tomorrow
It is and I believe all work is done.
Ride cycling this evening is horrible load cycles are regularly hitting 5 minutes and more. BGW use to have fairly quick ops.
They have turned off the timer screens but I was regularly clocking 5+ on my watch with a full crew working so budget cut short staffing can't even take the blame. In years past you would almost never see a train waiting on brake run with two train ops
1 fast/motivated ride op can't fix a slow crew.When I go to university in August I wanna apply to be a ride op so badI will fix this if I have to do it by myself.
I feel for the parks ride ops and it's not really fair to put tons of blame on them for slow dispatches. The park asks ops to work long, hot days for embarrassingly low pay given the parks profits, and our reward system for hitting high numbers of dispatches is basically the equivalent of a pat on the back. 5 minute dispatches are bad, and I'm not saying they aren't, but if you want something to change the pressure should really be put on park and SEAS leadership to give ops a reason to be quick, not on the ride ops at Apollo or any other ride. Imo
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