Lightning Racer was dispatching trains at 5 minute intervals, sometimes longer, on Friday. Trains would pull into the station, guests would hop out, and it would be 1-2 minutes of literally zero visually evident activity before the gates would eventually open. For much of that 1-2 minutes there would be no ops on the platform, nor anyone in the elevated section between the two boarding platforms. Then, suddenly, employees would appear and airgates would open. Restraint checks were ultra leisurely, at least when we rode.
Since they can eat two lines at once with that ride, and it is all fed by a single line, the wait wasn't too bad... until we got into the row-specific chutes on one side or the other. Then, having chosen a side and specific row, if you wanted to know how many more minutes you'd wait, you would do well to count the number of people in front of you and multiply by 3. Are there 8 people in front of you for your row? Well, then you're gonna wait a solid 20-25 more minutes to ride this roller coaster with the highest theoretical capacity in the park. Oof.
Single train ops partially explained the issue. Ops were discussing, with a frustrated supervisor, the call they had put in 30 minutes prior to have a second set of trains brought on. It had gone unanswered. Given the unreal dispatch intervals, they would have stacked the second train immediately anyway. But at least the molasses-like boarding process could have been made simultaneous with the time for a dispatched train to actually complete its circuit, cutting off a couple of minutes per cycle. Then the wait would only have been 3+ minutes per cycle, which is what you might expect from good single-train operation.
Low staffing also explained part of it. And maybe the best ops were long gone, back in school while laggards picked up the slack. I dunno. Here's the thing, though: I looked around and couldn't figure out where the ops were disappearing to for 1-2 minutes after each train unloaded. It was as if they just melted away in front of our eyes. Like mediocre chocolate. Total silence. Long queue. Everyone waiting. No explanation. Then, finally, they returned and got back to work as if nothing was strange. Over and over again. I wonder if the supervisor showed up due to guest complaints about the wait.
I'm not typically a complainer around here, in the style of others I could name. But this whole experience was surprisingly infuriating. While I don't go to Hershey expecting the strongest ride operations in the regional park industry, this made the Hershey Intamin rides' (lackluster) uptime plus slow dispatch times look positively world class. At least those rides' ops were consistently visible!
(Don't get me started on the app: an open ride with the occasional short 5 minute queue would show up accurately, but a fully closed ride ALSO would show up as an open ride with a 5 minute queue. Including rides that had not yet opened at all for the day. Super useful!)
The only thing I can come up with for Lightning Racer, based on my own time in the industry, is that something odd was going on belowdecks with the ride, and for some reason it required the attention of all hands to resolve it every single time a train came into the station. But then, what would that issue be? Why seek to add a second train? What would that resolve, rather than complicate?
