I love this conversation, but can we all take a minute and appreciate how fucking nerdy we are to talk this long about a train sitting still a couple feet up a lift hill? We get more excitement out of a coaster when it's NOT moving at this point, I love this place
Griffon
- Thread starter Zachary
- Start date
It's far more exciting than discussing current events in the world, that's for sure.
Anyways, am I weird to actually want to experience a non-life threatening evacuation at least once?
Anyways, am I weird to actually want to experience a non-life threatening evacuation at least once?
Best chance is at new rides or rides with recently updated controls systems. Flume 2015 was a hell of a summer after they updated the PLC... Probably did 15 or so evacs and it wasn't even my ride! I'm sure Pantheon and Apollo will have the highest likelihood for this year. That said, the chances that you are on it when it goes down are still slim.
I'm pretty afraid of heights, so I really don't want to be evac'd even though I can understand the appeal of it. Also I'm worried it would happen the one time I decided I could go without a bathroom break before getting on the ride....
Evac from Volcano before the launch: great.
Evac from Cobra’s Curse at the top of the elevator: awful.
And we are way off-topic now.
Evac from Cobra’s Curse at the top of the elevator: awful.
And we are way off-topic now.
Oh. Actually I was evac'd from Volcano before the launch in its last season. I forgot about that. So it's already happened and, yeah, that was fine - and I didn't have to pee. lol. Except that we didn't get to ride Volcano right then. They did give us a 1 time fast pass to skip the line later and did get to ride it, so it was alright. Sorry for the continuing off-topic.
So unrelated to evac but an interesting note:
I remember way back near the first year or two of Griffon being open that some dude I'm front of me had his hat tossed by one of his buddies over the fence and in the grass by the brake run.
Idiot proceeded to climb the fence (mind you, this is in the switchback right before getting into the station, so this was next to the transfer track), and go grab his hat. If my memory serves correctly, not only did he do all of that and get back in line (ops were running slow), but the ops team didn't stop advancing trains and there wasn't any noticeable downtime.
I rode with some of my friends a few moments later, and kind of forgot to see what happened to the guy - not sure if anyone said anything to him.
I remember way back near the first year or two of Griffon being open that some dude I'm front of me had his hat tossed by one of his buddies over the fence and in the grass by the brake run.
Idiot proceeded to climb the fence (mind you, this is in the switchback right before getting into the station, so this was next to the transfer track), and go grab his hat. If my memory serves correctly, not only did he do all of that and get back in line (ops were running slow), but the ops team didn't stop advancing trains and there wasn't any noticeable downtime.
I rode with some of my friends a few moments later, and kind of forgot to see what happened to the guy - not sure if anyone said anything to him.
Probably didn't see him. Protocol is to hit an emergency stop on any report of a person in the ride restricted area. Automatic ejection and indefinite ban from SEAS properties. They take safety very seriously.
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If ops are busy, they probably wouldn't notice him unless someone pointed him out to them. Also, the cameras are really only for monitoring the riders on the train, not for viewing restricted areas beneath the track.
That's exactly the issue. As AI develops, there may be an application where it could work, but any sensor could trip if an animal, or a bunch of leaves for that matter, trip the sensor. At Verbolten, there is a photo eye sensor (light beam) that protects the restricted area while maintenance is able to walk to the open storage shed. When we would have a really heavy rain, it would often trip. Most of the time, we were already down, but if the ride was in motion, it would station stop the ride (like an estop, but just for the station/transfer/brake area). Busch already has a number of safety systems in place, such as light curtains on some rides (Griffon or Alpie for example), pressure pads (they estop the ride when someone steps on them at Apollo or Alpie), and special Pro-Safe locks for every gate in a ride restricted area (pull the key from its cabinet and the ride estops). Unfortunately, this doesn't prohibit fence climbing. I guess the park didn't like the look of razor wire on top of fences...
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This makes me wonder if AI could have saved Fabio’s face, or if it would’ve made the problem worse. ?
I actually have a Griffon-specific question about these locks. Years ago (2013? 2014?) I actually found one of the path-adjacent ride perimeter gates open while Griffon was operating. I hunted down a supervisor who was (naturally) pretty alarmed. I take it that the keys to these locks are what are monitored by the system, not the status of the locks and gates themselves?
Hopefully the Coaster Tour eventually will return, offering a much better version of that experience. And you get to ride the funky cable-lift tiered inclinator both up and down the lift hill.
I took the tour with a friend, and he asked a good question at the halfway journey to the top:
"What's the backup system if this one cable I see snaps?"
Silence from the tour guide.
That moment remains memorable. I never did try to peek beneath the inclinator to see if it had some type of silent anti-rollback system.
Exciting tour.
Griffon wheels are heavy.
Sure. The Allen-Bradley Pro-Safe Keys are interlocked so that the gate cannot be opened without the key being inserted. Vice versa, the key cannot be removed without the gate being closed and latched. The keys are all stored on the side of an electrical panel in the electrical room and are wired to switches so that removal of any key from the panel will e-stop the ride. My guess was that the gate you saw open was only a "limited-access" gate, not a "ride-restricted" gate, which all have Pro-Safe's. The only possible way for the gate to be open would be if someone took bolt cutters and broke open the Pro-Safe latch and the generic park keyed padlock to get in. Since I doubt that, I would guess that there was no real danger. Did you walk up to it and peer through? I would guess that the supervisor only had the limited knowledge of how they worked, which was from the SOP, though they probably checked it out immediately and would have shut down if there was danger. Who knows, maybe that person was me! I was in the area those years and a supervisor for 2014. I also had a limited knowledge of that back then (obviously much greater knowledge now). If you happen to remember where it was, I would like to figure out if it was a limited access or ride restricted fence.
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