bp/19

Theres no corn in Gary dude, just a bunch of burnt down and foreclosed buildings, pawn shops, tagged signs/buildings, and a few traces of what used to be steel mills.

Great TR, I love natural landscapes and when TRs include the road trip. Also love all the pics of Aftershock. I spent so much time spent around that ride when it was at Great America i'm really glad to see it operating again. BTW it did have the orange seatbelts at SFGAm, the original train design didnt feature them but extra belts were added to all of them before they opened. They also added extra bars on the side and in the middle of the restraints to keep people from reaching up and touching the limit switches on the track. Original design

I agree with all posts above the preshow is very well themed, however I find it extrodinarily bad that Six Flags did not design it properly in accordance with capacity of the ride. The preshows should have been designed to hold at least 50 more people and have a longer path afterwards and not just a staircase. I dont understand how they spend millions on designing/building a major attraction but do not calculate details like this correctly. I couldn't believe my first few rides on it that they were sending half empty trains all the time with a 1 1/2 hour line of just letting people through and figured eventually they would figure it out and from these posts it sounds like they haven't. The pre-show is the by far the best themed part of the ride and I agree that people should see it, but compared to most preshows its very difficult to follow and doesn't make much sense. Just having a regular queueing flow through it would make the most sense in my opinion.

As a former DejaVu Great America ride op I can say even while the park was open, it was still down for several weeks/months at a time while the ride was getting major rehabs and programming changes to get it operating more reliably, and it still met its fate

As generic of a coaster Rockit looks for an immersive park like Universal, they definitley scored big with the look of the new Harry Potter ride. I have to admit, thats pretty incredible. Although one minute detail that kind of sticks out to me is the building sticks off the edge of the mountain in the back. I havent seen the movies so don't know if its supposed to look like that but it does look rather bizarre. Other than that, to put it simply, visually stunning. Hopefully the ride delivers as much as the building . And BTW excellent pics! Always love TRs that cover the things most people dont.

The longest line at Disney Parks are for small rides and meet & greets. Can you imagine taking your kids to Florida, then having to wait 45 minutes for Dumbo or to meet Tinker Bell? That would be torture, yet thousands of people do it every day. Anything they do to address this is better than everybody waiting in a long queue.

SFGADV in 2005 was pretty bad. We got the park late in the afternoon and got in line for Kingda Ka, there was a rope that led from the rides regular entrance like a mile down the midway where there was a line greeter sitting in the middle of the midway. We missed the real "entrance" while walking through Golden Kingdom so ducked under the rope and entered under the entrance sign since the line didnt extend out. After waiting through the queue house and breakdowns, we realized they were collecting boarding passes and had an "oh crap" moment and left the line, and re-entered through the entrance where the greeter was and got boarding passes. We waited through the line again and watched some lady get extremely mad that she didn't have a boarding pass but pleaded with security that she waited through the whole line (naturally we knew what hapenned and it really wasnt here fault, just ignorance to the fact the line started somewhere else). Security, not very nice people at SFGAdv at the time, had some attitude and made a big scene with her. Then we were almost to the station when the ride broke down again and was down for the night. At this point it was dark and we rode GASM, Chiller, and Nitro and that was it. Nitro was running 3 trains but the load times were so excruciatingly slow each train would literally sit in the brake run for like 10 minutes before coming back in the station. People were chanting "get us off!" etc. Spent the next day at SFGAdv also and it was more of the same. We did end up getting on Kingda Ka once after waiting through another bunch of breakdowns. Got all the credits and got the hell out. My next visit to GAdv was in 2008 and the park was ran much better however something pretty hysterical hapenned while waiting in line for Rolling Thunder. Only 1 side was open and it was 1 train op, we were in the station when they stopped running the ride and there were about 10 employees all up in the station and they just stopped working and started talking to eachother. The train literally sat in the station while the employees stood at the control panel and talked to eachother. About 1/2 hour later they opened the gates and kept running the ride. We asked the fulltime supervisor that was up there what was up with that after we rode and she said "we were debating weather to add a train or not." (they didnt, it reopened with 1). I found that kindve sad but funny and shrugged it off but the people I was there with with made sure to stay there and give her a pretty good verbal beatdown. It did really suck waiting the station for a crappy ride like Rolling Thunder, having no idea whats going on and the employees wont even talk to any of the guests, watching El Toro zip by every few minutes and listening to "Rawhide" playing over the station speakers over and over again. Another bad experience was CP in 2007. We left Geauga Lake early in the afternoon in hopes of catching a few night rides at CP and got in line for Dragster when we arrived. About 2 trains before it was our turn it started raining so the ride went down. Awhile later it stopped raining and they tried to test it but to no avail, it was down for the rest of the night. They were nice enough to walk us over to MF though and it started storming right before we got on MF, so we got a thunderstorm ride on MF which was pretty sweet. The next day though the Intamin bug got us again. Had early entry because of Breakers Express and went to Maverick which wasnt open yet. It opened about 45 minutes late and we got on it then went to MF, which wasnt open yet (also was supposed to be open for early entry). Waited in the long line outside the entrance and it opened like a half hour later and we made it to the station, and it broke down again. After a bit they fixed it and we rode then got in line for Wicked Twister, and it broke down! Dragster also broke down on us again later that day. Later that night we went to Maverick for our last ride. It was broken down so we walked around for a bit then went back once it re-opened. It broke down at least 3 or 4 times while we were in line and they werent announcing any of them, there was like a 20 minute gap between trains then when they would send one everyone would start cheering. There finally was one really long downtime that wasnt announced and I thought the queue house (that was full) was going to go into an all-out riot. Eventually the ride worked long enough for us to get on. At SFMM sometime last summer, in line for X2 it was moving extremely slow. After waiting through the queue house we got to the split and the line didnt move for over 1/2 hour. The ride was running 2 trains the load times werent bad or anything, we couldnt figure out what was going on. Trains were still going by with frequency so I looked to see if they were trying to clear out the line in the station or post-split but they werent, both stations had groupers the whole time. I find it hard to believe they were just letting Flashpasses through the split for 1/2 hour, but thats what it looked like was going on. For a comical one, it was looking like I was going to be late for work one morning in 2005 so I was sprinting through SFGAm's employee parking lot to clock in on time. Well....since breaking my foot playing football i've had kindve a funky walk which doesnt translate well into sprinting and ended up eating it on the rocks and completely gashing up my leg. Still determined not to be late, got up and kept running on a limp and got into the office leg gushing blood and everything, and swiped with 2 seconds to spare. Then took a nice painful walk to Giant Drop and told one of my co workers I was going to first aid. At first aid the guy working there had a good laugh...then soiled my entire leg in what felt like rubbing alchohaul (not pleasant) and wrapped it up. Then I went back to Giant Drop and worked my shift. My visit to Indiana Beach in 2008 just sucked. We got there at opening and neither Steel Hawg or Cornball was open. The place was packed, the coasters that were open were running 1 train, LoCoSuMo broke down a bunch of times while we were frying in the sun in the long, horrible slow moving queue. Cornball didnt open until around 3pm and Steel Hawg didnt open until after that. We waited outside Steel Hawg's entrance for awhile and it vallied (literally stopped in the middle of a turn and sat there until later they went and pushed it) and opened it a few hours later. Luckily we waited outside the entrance again and got on it with a wait of only 1-1 1/2 hours, the line was full queues and extended nearly halfway down the park (Steel Hawgs capacity is TERRIBLE, has to be the lowest capacity coaster i've ever seen), felt kinda bad for the people in that line. I stopped in Vegas while driving out to Cali and went to Stratosphere first thing in the morning. I asked if the rides were going to be open and they said yes, at 10AM, so I walked around a bit and returned at 10 and the rides did not open because of cold. Manhatten Express was down for rehab, Speed was going through its big downtime at the time and re-opened not long after my trip, the entire Adventuredome was down for rehab (found this out when I got to Circus Circus, completely my fault for not checking , but still seemed bizarre the entire park would be down), so the only ride I got on that day was Desperado which was horrible.

I'm not sure of the exact reason polyurethane is slower than nylon (someone else can probably chime in on that) but SFGAm would certainly always prefer them because they last longer and are cheaper. They typically run Raging Bull with half nylon half polyurethane or something like that during the spring, go to all polyurethane during summer, then during fall go back to half and half (this cycle has been thrown somewhat out of whack in recent years as the maintenance guys keep getting more workload/no budget for more staff). Reason for the wheel changes is because in the colder weather they obviously want the train to run faster so it doesn't valley but they also want the wheels to last.

The trims have always been there, some years back they were turned up considerably. You are correct about them adjusting automatically based on the speed of the train though, normally when the train is empty they wont activate as hard. It also depends on the wheels. I've seen it FLYING with empty trains and the trims on hard (before the park opened in 06 if I remember right) because it was running entirely nylon wheels. During the summer typically it runs polyeurothane wheels and runs a lot slower.