Everest stopped mid ride?

[disneypookies]

I just overheard a coworker talking about the ride being stopped just before the backwards part of the ride. They all had to get off the ride and exit through the emergency exits yesterday. Anyone know of any tech problems they could have had? It would really suck for such a great ride to start having problems.

 

[Bill From PA]

After the pause at the top, the track 'switches' behind the line of cars, just like a railroad track does to allow a train to leave one track and go to another. Going backwards takes you on a different route than the ride up. If the mechanism that does the track switch failed, there'd be no option other than getting everyone off to walk back down unless it was to wait for however long the repairs took. I'd imagine that after a mechanical failure is fixed, they test the repairs with empty cars until they're sure all is OK.

Bill From PA

 

[TheRustyScupper]

. . . After the pause at the top, the track 'switches' behind the line of cars, just like a railroad track does to allow a train to leave one track and go to another . . .

1) The Everest track actually "rolls".
2) The track switch and rails are fixed, as over-and-under.
3) After you reach the top, the track rolls over and the new track appears. *
4) There have been glitches with this in the past.

* Think of rolling over a fried egg to the sunnyside-down position.

 

[Fitswimmer]

I live in NJ and last year there was a huge new coaster called Kingda Ka that opened in Six Flags. That whole first summer they had problems with it, minor breakdowns and such. The papers said that problems show up during the first year of a ride that can't really be avoided. Those kind of brief shutdowns are normal.

 

[Sharon Esch]

I heard on the news this morning one stop at a park in Cincinatti, OH (Kings Island), maybe that's what the coworker heard!

 

[Brian Noble]

The Kings Island/Son of Beast problem was more serious, in that there were several significant injuries---including at least one broken sternum. I'm guessing it will be down for a long time.

The major Kinda Ka failure was due to the liner protecting the catapult catch car shredded itself, and throwing debris into the train's path during a launch---it toasted a train and some sections of the rollback brakes. Luckily, that was a test launch, with no one on the ride. But, it took the ride out of operation for nearly two months.

These are both pretty big deals. But, it's overwhelmingly likely that the Everest "walk off" was something almost entirely routine. These rides have an enormous number of sensors, etc. throughout the ride, and if one of them thinks something has gone wrong, the entire ride stops. In some situations, it takes long enough to figure out that nothing serious has happened and restart the ride that it is better to evacuate guests than leave them in the ride vehicles unitl the restart. This happens all the time---I was walked out of Big Thunder *and* Splash Mountain on my last trip during an E-stop, and in both cases the ride was back up just a bit later.