General / Off-Topic Sad day: Coaster derails in UK

Crowdpleaser

Crowdpleaser
I can understand Fire, because that is not really under your Control. Especially Electrical Fire. But Coasters derailing? Come on Guys.
 

siddus

S
For those who said that a coaster car would never come off the tracks, it just happened in Scotland over the weekend.
 

Mr Deuce

Mr Deuce
siddus said:
For those who said that a coaster car would never come off the tracks, it just happened in Scotland over the weekend.
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Yes - I thought of this thread and what I had said when I saw the story. I'm totally shocked for several reasons of course, it's terrible. But I maintain that by design it can never happen, I suspect a severe case of unmonitored wear and tear. An entire wheel assembly came loose!! I suppose in time we'll find out what broke and why. I doubt we'll have to wait very long this time - mechanical failure is normally pretty easy to work back to the cause.
 

Abletudu

Abletudu
This might be slightly off topic, but this I think is an interesting read about that Park: http://www.rollercoasterphilosophy.com/tag/tsunami/

Especially this part:
After falling in love with the Scottish soil over four days in Edinburgh, M&Ds Scotland’s Theme Park (just outside of Glasgow) would have tough work ahead of it to reverse that opinion of a nation in only a single day, but it seemed up to the challenge. Home to no less than four Pinfari death traps… excuse me, roller coasters, one of which is a routine contender for the worst steel roller coaster in the world in internet polls, in an amusement center that better resembles a cheap carnival than any actual thematically integrated park as the name would have you believe.
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It seems that the manufacturer of this coaster made it to be portable like you might find in a carnival. Sometimes employees at a carnival do not get proper training in maintaining rides and I suspect that this might be the root cause of this terrible tragedy, but time will tell.
 

gregorburns

G
Parkmaker said:
It seems that the manufacturer of this coaster made it to be portable like you might find in a carnival. Sometimes employees at a carnival do not get proper training in maintaining rides and I suspect that this might be the root cause of this terrible tragedy, but time will tell.
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I believe most of M&Ds rides are portable. I don't know if it still exists but I was in Southport (England) once and in the theme park there (Southport Pleasureland) was a ferris wheel belonging to M&Ds that was on a temporary lease. I remember watching them dismantle that ferris wheel piece-by-piece before packing it away to transport it back up to Scotland. I was only small at the time but it looked like a pretty huge wheel and it was quite scary to see it just disappear within a few hours. Since that I've always been weary of travelling rides and fairs. [uhh]
 

Mr Deuce

Mr Deuce
Parkmaker said:
This might be slightly off topic, but this I think is an interesting read about that Park: http://www.rollercoasterphilosophy.com/tag/tsunami/

Especially this part:


It seems that the manufacturer of this coaster made it to be portable like you might find in a carnival. Sometimes employees at a carnival do not get proper training in maintaining rides and I suspect that this might be the root cause of this terrible tragedy, but time will tell.
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The coaster is indeed portable, it's been erected in several places before it came to the park. It must have been way past its expected lifespan in terms of circuits but even so, I refuse to accept that steel assemblies can break apart like that without some signs being detectable in advance. Inspections can't had been that thorough. Either that or an aged part of the assembly had been repaired inappropriately.
 

Mr Deuce

Mr Deuce
gregorburns1 said:
I believe most of M&Ds rides are portable. I don't know if it still exists but I was in Southport (England) once and in the theme park there (Southport Pleasureland) was a ferris wheel belonging to M&Ds that was on a temporary lease. I remember watching them dismantle that ferris wheel piece-by-piece before packing it away to transport it back up to Scotland. I was only small at the time but it looked like a pretty huge wheel and it was quite scary to see it just disappear within a few hours. Since that I've always been weary of travelling rides and fairs. [uhh]
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We have a fair in our town each year and on the meadows they build a mouse coaster - I've sat on the grass and watched them build it in a single day. Never any problems with it (other than this year the meadows flooded and it sank a bit lol), but I do wonder if by erecting and dismantling it so many times each year, the workers might be a bit complacent perhaps. I think familiarity and experience can sometimes work against you.

For example, if they found at the end of a day's operation a bolt had sheared, would they close the ride down whilst engineers crawled all over it to find the reason excessive force had been applied to the bolt? Or would they simply shrug, pop to screwfix and replace the bolt?
 
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gregorburns

G
Deuce said:
I do wonder if by erecting and dismantling it so many times each year, the workers might be a bit complacent perhaps. I think familiarity and experience can sometimes work against you.
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Yeah, I don't doubt the engineering of the rides themselves. This is the thing that puts me off.
 

Mr Deuce

Mr Deuce
From a kid who winessed the incident:

Samuel, 14, who was at the park with his family and witnessed the crash, told BBC Scotland: "I could see one of the wheels was shaking so I started to walk away from it and then it was about to turn the corner and it started heavy shaking and everyone was screaming.
"It then just fell straight off the lines. It just crashed and all you could hear was a big bang."
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Sounds like there was some free play in the wheel assembly leading up to the crash. If that's the case it's pretty unforgivable. The bolts that hold these things together are marked once tightened so any movement can be visually identified and would normally be checked very frequently. All conjecture at the moment of course, but I really do think the first engineer on site (if not already) will probably take only minutes to get a working theory of what happened and why. Lot's of evidence to compile and I'm sure the official report will take a long time. But I imagine looking at the two parts that separated will very quickly reveal why they separated.
 

Periocus

Periocus
siddus said:
For those who said that a coaster car would never come off the tracks, it just happened in Scotland over the weekend.
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Nonsense. The context is incorrect.

We mostly talked about doing it for "people bowling" or would you assume M&D did it for fun to watch people get crushed?
Of course coaster can derail, but it is so rare (Coasters are in real life never build so they could derail.) you wouldn't notice it in PC or the work for translating it into the game is wasted time.

Even some of the most intense or strange coasters in the world do not derail. You get hurt. Some people even die on them. The guests throw up a lot, but the train stays on track.
 
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