You guys notice when you go to an amuzment park(Six Flags, Canada's Wonderland...), you have to wait forever in line because there are only two trains on a track? Why only two? Whay not three or four? They should build a separate parking line, so every time a train arrives, it can park and wait a few seconds for the one in front of it to go. I think it would save so much time and we wouldn't have to wait for 2 hours for a 10 second ride!-- irinel, Feb 24 2004 Hey, the lines are important! That way 'fraidy-cats like me can say we don't want to go on "because the line is too long."-- phundug, Feb 24 2004 Now we’ll have to use lame excuses like, “I don’t want to ride that one because the trains keep crashing into each other.”-- AO, Feb 24 2004 Aren't we all about saving time???-- irinel, Feb 24 2004 So you mean to tell me that you enjoy waiting in line-ups during your leisure? You don't make any sense.If I have a day off work, I wouldn't want to waste it on waiting around..So, you can go save a million question marks and I'll go relax!-- irinel, Feb 24 2004 I'm sure the roller coasters are regulated, and that the designers do what they can within these regulations to make them as time-efficient as possible.-- yabba do yabba dabba, Feb 24 2004 Queues are probably far cheaper than building sidings and extra trains. The longer theme parks can have you standing in lines (without complaining) the more money they make.-- kropotkin, Mar 22 2004 [tsuka] - we all have very limited vacation time, why would you want to waste it smelling other peoples farts in line ?, doesn't sound like fun to me.
Anyways, this is very baked, at Islands of Adventure in Orlando, all of their roller coasters can have up to 3 sets of cars on the track, there is a separate line for those who want to sit in the front row, there is even an electronic ticket system so that you swipe your card and then bypass the line in 2 hours (so you don't have to wait around).-- SystemAdmin, Mar 22 2004 Are you talking about having the loading and unloading of people happening on seperate sidings?
For example, as train #4 pulls up to the siding, train #3 is finished loading people and begins to move out, train #2 is just started loading, and train #1 is just pulled in.
I think this would save time as I bet a lot of the delay is in the loading/unloading of people. So if the ride is 2 minutes and it takes 4 minutes to load/unload people, you could have three times as many riders per minute.-- GenYus, Mar 22 2004 [tsuka] - if I wanted to relax, I wouldn't go to an amusement park, I don't think anyone would.
Leisure time doesn't just mean lounging around, for example, wakeboarding, snowmobiling, mountain climbing all lesuire activities , none of them are relaxing. They are fun, but they are also difficult and challenging.
[genyus] - they already do exactly what you're talking about-- SystemAdmin, Mar 22 2004 You call this leisure?????????????????-- Mungo, Mar 22 2004 Amusement park rides have a finite capacity, both in terms of people-per-hour and simultaneous people. If a park's rides can only accommodate a total of 500 people at once and there are 2,500 people in the park, then at any given time 80% of the people must be either waiting in line or else milling around between rides.-- supercat, Mar 22 2004 [SystemAdmin], do they load and unload several cars at the same time? Or do they just have multiple cars running at the same time?-- GenYus, Mar 23 2004 //[SystemAdmin], do they load and unload several cars at the same time? Or do they just have multiple cars running at the same time? //
Most single-track roller coasters load all the cars of one train at a time; double-track coasters simultaneously load a train on each track.
I believe (perhaps some expert could correct me if I'm wrong) that the reason roller coasters are usually limitted to three trains is that there are three main bottlenecks: the station (loading/unloading), the lift hill, and the gravity run. Each of these bottlenecks has a queueing area before it, but trains are forbidden from entering any bottleneck until the previous train has completely vacated it (the trains must instead wait in the queueing area).
If one of the sections of the ride takes significantly longer than the others, splitting it in two would allow another train to be added usefully. This is apt to be most practical on the lift hill. Splitting the gravity run is apt to be much less desirable since it requires having a spot somewhere past the half-way point where the train will have little kinetic energy and need none. For rides with multiple lift hills, the later lift hills could easily be used as semaphore spots, but late lift hills tend to 'break up' a ride experience.
If the gravity run portion of a roller coaster takes one minute and the train is moving quickly throughout, then the best possible throughput for that coaster will be one trainload of people per minute per track, no matter how many trains are running on it. If the station time is less than a minute, then I would expect a coaster to achieve pretty close to the 60 trains/hour theoretical maximum.-- supercat, Mar 23 2004 Many years ago the local amusement park here had a slogan that said, "Betcha Can't Do it All!" on their commericals and advertisements. And now I see why- You spend 80% of your day waiting in line.-- Jscotty, Feb 09 2006 random, halfbakery