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jscll said:
I was told by the ride staff that GCII's minimum operating temp for InvadR is 32F.
It is such a shame that BGW won't run rides under 40F, so far the coldest weather I have ridden a rollercoaster in is 28F.
^^^To the best of my knowledge, no manufacture bases service interval on temperature. If someone can point me to documentation that states otherwise, please do let me know.
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If that's in relation to my post, 2 things:

First: I'm by no means the expert on it so definitely interested if someone could correct my line of thinking with knowledge/proof.

Second: what my understanding is that various components may become less reliable due to cold. The impact of less reliable components may cause extra wear and tear that may not already be scheduled to rehab. It's possible there's documentation on it but I sure don't know where to look for it.

I was trying to come up with an example of how that happens, the best I could come up with is a component such as a set of brake calipers gets stuck in a failsafe position (closed in a way that a train can still be caught), but frees up when the train goes through because of the cold since it was not designed with winter in mind. Depending on the ride, this may or may not throw a fault requiring maintenance to inspect, fix, then reset the ride. Assuming it doesn't, the ops are gonna keep cycling. It'll be a bit rough on the riders, and the brakes and possibly their related components are now also far more worn out than initially planned for, and as such may require an overhaul ahead of planned maintenance. Now imagine that's not just one set of calipers, but actually the MCBR, trims, and final brake run thus taking the repairs from maybe a few hours downtime at the start of the day to a multi-day repair project involving specialized and costly parts.

So the park chooses to run that risk, or just stick with the minimum temperature recommendations and thus mitigate most of that risk.
 
To clarify my position, I was thinking in terms of weighing existing budget constraints against likely ridership. I'm not saying people wouldn't subject themselves to that arctic experience. I am questioning whether enough people would want to ride the coasters to justify the expense of having several open, given BGW's financial situation (even before COVID).
 
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The temperature limit determines the amount coasters can open. If that becomes too restrictive, for example in NJ or MA, then they need to extend it or get even less attendance. If most of the time conditions are not extreme, then few will ride when it gets brutal. I can go a little below 40, but in Virginia there's little point in going a lot lower.
 
This is where some “smaller” coasters like a Wild Mouse, and a second kiddie coaster like model can come in handy. Even if they are outdoors you could have something that doesn’t go too fast but have something open.
 
BGWnut said:
Going to be hard to have a member preview day with the park open every day. Still I'm excited about member day.
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I’d actually love to know the percentage of Member reservations during any of the recent events - on some level every day is Member Day at the moment.
 
Memles said:
I’d actually love to know the percentage of Member reservations during any of the recent events - on some level every day is Member Day at the moment.
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I was told that 25 percent was the cap for member slots for the events obviously not every event was a sell out and not every member slot even sold out so it would be hard to figure out the exact percentage.
 
horsesboy said:
I was told that 25 percent was the cap for member slots for the events obviously not every event was a sell out and not every member slot even sold out so it would be hard to figure out the exact percentage.
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The percentage of member slots is higher than that. Significantly higher is you factor in Fun card, annual passes, and etc.
 
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Nicole said:
I hope Fun Card and Annual Pass holders are not included in the category of “Member.”
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I wouldn't think so, considering that there are 4 different tiers of "members" that would be a lot of extra people of you also include the fun card and annual pass people. Not to mention they have different reservation slots
 
Nicole said:
I hope Fun Card and Annual Pass holders are not included in the category of “Member.”
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Not quite. How it was explained to me is there are 4 buckets. And they are the 4 different ways you can make reservations. Members/annual passes, fun cards/military passes, pre existing tickets and then ticket purchases. I was told that fun cards start as the smallest bucket, followed by pre existing tickets then ticket purchases. The buckets then are tweaked based on the number of reservations for each one. So if one doesn't have very much but others are sold out they will move some to other ones to free up reservations.
 
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I was referring specifically to how it was phased:

“The percentage of member slots is higher than that. Significantly higher is you factor in Fun card, annual passes, and etc.”

That sounds as if the park might factor the other types of passes into the category of “Membership.” Given how lax they have gotten about things like Member Days, it would not surprise me if they were in fact doing just that.
 
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b.mac said:
Great Adventure has a totally different market than BGW but they seem to be doing good with having more than half of their coasters running in the dead of winter.
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I don't expect every park to be Great Adventure (Their coasters don't have a minimum operating temperature and they can and have run Nitro and all of their B&M's well into the teens, I've even been on Kingda Ka at 28 degrees in November) but it would be nice to see BGW try to do something to lower those limits a bit, maybe like what Hersheypark does where they've installed a bunch of wheel heaters in Candymonium's station. Even pushing it to the mid-30's would be a big difference. Dollywood and Silver Dollar City also have minimum running temps in the mid-30's for most coasters. Every coaster is different of course, but there's probably room to improve upon this a little and maybe they will down the line.
 
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@coasterbill they might if they determine there's a positive ROI for doing so.

My guess is they won't even bother looking at it for the next year or two considering the budgetary issues for SEAS as a whole.

Then there's a question of if projected ridership for making such upgrades will increase guest spending, either in ticket sales or in park spending, and/or is there a large enough incremental attendance boost.

Additionally, there's also technology requirements - the B&Ms alone were built in the 90s, so what upgrades would have to be made/additional maintenance be needed to support such operations?

Edit: forgot to include guest experience though it kind of ties into the earlier point about ridership - just how many guests are only coming to the park to ride coasters, and what effect does weather conditions have on their desire to ride? If they're members then their visit may not have any direct impact to the bottom line though may help continue maintaining or increasing membership sales which is valuable but harder to pinpoint for an ROI analysis.
 
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coasterbill said:
I don't expect every park to be Great Adventure (Their coasters don't have a minimum operating temperature and they can and have run Nitro and all of their B&M's well into the teens, I've even been on Kingda Ka at 28 degrees in November) but it would be nice to see BGW try to do something to lower those limits a bit, maybe like what Hersheypark does where they've installed a bunch of wheel heaters in Candymonium's station. Even pushing it to the mid-30's would be a big difference. Dollywood and Silver Dollar City also have minimum running temps in the mid-30's for most coasters. Every coaster is different of course, but there's probably room to improve upon this a little and maybe they will down the line.
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They do have a minimum recommended operating temperature. All of the B&Ms are 32 degrees, but it's clarified operations can continue at the operator's discretion.

I think the easiest thing BGW can do is just do what Hershey did and build an indoor coaster, they have a now generally unoccupied building that'd be perfect for it.
 
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My hunch is that it’s not all that expensive or that big of an undertaking or Six Flags wouldn’t be able to do it because they’re... well... them.

I’m not saying they need to adopt their “YOLO” weather policies as great as that would be, but they seem to be a few degrees more conservative than most parks.

As for the question of how many people want to ride rides in 30 degree temperatures, we can look to other parks for that and the answer is “plenty”.
 
Do people generally go to any SF or CF park for the scenery and atmosphere, or do they mainly go for the rides? Now what about any SEAS park?

Granted the pandemic screwed the entertainment options at most parks making rides more important overall, but the financial decisions to make modifications to existing rides in some parks would need to be justified against increasing entertainment options including zoological exhibitions.
 
HFE parks have comparable theming and better entertainment and their coasters are still a big draw in cold-weather months. They have made no notable modifications to any rides but dropped the temp limits the last few years, though they were always lower than BGW. Even if you wanted to add those wheel heaters, I think they sound more complex than they really are. They’re about the same as you’d see at a random restaraunt with outdoor tables. Also, most parks don’t even have them. Six Flags never used them at Great Adventure and rarely even bothers in New England except for on a few rides.

I generally dislike this conversation because fans of every park say that their rides won’t run below xxxx temperature... until they do. Maybe there’s something really special about InvadR, Verbolten and Alpengeist that make them much different than other coasters of their type, but I think it’s more likely that BGW is just being conservative and might lighten up on it over time as they keep doing this. That’s my hope at least...
 
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