Benin

You read the article, they won't call the services until they've seen the incident... Ergo, it'll probably take security/other staff to get there in 10 minutes from Towers Street... Standard procedure really...

Some positive reports coming out of the media day today (THERE'S a shock, especially with enthusiasts there)... Hopefully a POV will come out of it, though it does appear that the 'inversion' is a really over-banked turn (like, +90 degrees style)...

As Bill said, there is nothing in there that states that Varney is considering scrapping it... Newspapers pretty do make up anything, a similar situation here was one paper I think claiming it was down to human error because Varney said they were "considering it as a possibility", which is the correct thing to do... Gotta sell those papers/get those hits somehow...

To say you're worried about 18 year olds operating rides is daft, they do get trained for a lot of hours on the rides, pass medicals and have to do a written test (or at least they did, it may have changed since)... There's also a lot of 18 year olds who are more mature than 24/30/45 year olds as well... Towers also don't tend to have that many 18 year olds operating the big rides (same for Chessie and Thorpe I'd say, don't see many 18 year olds operating Stealth), so it's a rather unfounded fear... Of course, you usually cannot train for an incident like this, indeed, the odds on this event happening are the reason everyone is so surprised that it has happened... I'd still be more worried about riding an Intamin with a lap bar because they've chucked plenty of people out of them than riding a Gerst...

It's almost as if someone posted a picture on the last page that said exactly that....... Splatoon is fab though, Ryan's correct to ignore people for it...

I can tell you for a fact that Vampire doesn't have full coverage CCTV... Usually the CCTV is focused towards areas that the cars can stop on normally (I.e. MCBRs, lift hills) as those are the areas that it's usually required the most... Dark rides are obviously a different matter...

I'd say the strong winds caused the initial stall... But as Marc said, the main focus should be on why the crash happened rather than a stall... Besides, the trims on Smiler are magnetic, so are constantly 'on' and don't tend to affect the trains as bad as Thirteen's one...

They'll be checking everything with block brakes on it... So every coaster in the park needs to have the once over irrespective of it having trims, because the reason this happened was not because of trims at all... Hell, I'm still always worried that Oblivion's brakes will fail and a crash occur when I'm sat on the brake run for ages... The way that brake run shakes when a train hits it *dread*

HSE want to check the other coasters to make sure that a similar situation cannot occur... They do use common sense for the majority of the time them lot, as lamented as they are at Towers for erecting daft fences...

I think we need cheering up, fortunately for that, we have Tayto Park:

I'm gonna bump this thread rather than create a new one but the figures for 2014 have been released: http://www.teaconnect.org/images/files/TEA_103_49736_150603.pdf Europe on page 55. All the parks in Europe (bar the two Disney Paris ones) have seen growth (I am surprised by Asterix's 11% growth), Merlin's lot are still within the same position holding a steady level with Legoland (Windsor) having the highest growth... Merlin still second to Disney, with Universal playing catch up... Be interesting to see Universal's figures when they've opened Potterland California, though it probably won't make too big a difference, since it's the same stuff as Florida...

Closing completely is better than having news crews/enthusiasts/guests with their phones/cameras pressed up against X-Sector's entrance... "Business as usual" would be awkward to enforce, especially as the staff themselves will feel stressed out by it all... Best to set up the plan of action without anyone coming in and kicking off about the incident...

Wouldn't surprise me if HSE wanted all the rides to be checked... Plus, stops people from gathering around X-Sector all day trying to see something happening... As people say, damned if they closed, damned if they open, the papers would have a field day if they were open to be fair to them... The right decision was to close irregardless... Allows them to get the stories straight and brief the staff appropriately as a result...

Stolen off someone on TST as I don't want to give the Dail Mail hits (and nor should YOU! YES, YOU!) Would not be surprised if someone has to lose a leg though, crush injuries are the absolute worst...

Wouldn't be a surprise that Merlin would instantly be giving compensation, if only to keep things out of court... Not the first time they've done it... But any sensible company in this situation would be offering high levels of comp, especially given the high likelihood of broken bones...

Quoted for new page.

You cannot stop a train through trim brakes alone, they are there to slow the train down for various reasons, not to bring the train to a stop... If rides were closed/torn down because of being involved in an incident, then we wouldn't have many rides left really... Vampire would close, Fury would close, Big Dipper, Big One, TTD, Xcelerator, California Screamin, Matterhorn, Big Thunder Mountain... I could REALLY go on, but for the sake of everyone's sanity, I shall not...

Loads of news outlets do that these days, it's quite amusing how much these places take Twitter as the entire truth devoid of any bias or over-exaggeration... Interesting about the train being stuck on the lift for numerous minutes, although the footage the BBC showed pretty much absolutely bugger all to actually prove it had been stopped and restarted after a rather lengthy period of time...

I'm not believing any claims like that until it's confirm via a proper news source... No-one is disagreeing that the ride system was the issue here... Just saying that the time available to ride ops (and guests) to notice the valley and being able to stop the next train is tiny, given that usually a train is on that lift hill by the time a train hits the brakes before the vertical one...

Some of the images posted do have people with blood on their faces and what-not (not surprising)... Based on that POV, the time-frame between noticing the ride had stalled and being able to stop the next train would have been very small indeed...

I feel that if the first train wasn't empty this wouldn't have happened...

The buck here, is probably gonna end up on Gerstlauer's door... The ride system should be working out itself that the block is still full with a valley... Not good at all...

http://www.europapark.de/zugabe Europa have released their basic closing times online... Of course, these are only the minimum times, most of them will end up being extended on the day...

That Spiderman show was amazing <3 Points also for that 'Premiere Screaming' event they did for Inferno... Those were certainly the days...

I'll be heading off to Dublin in August to be sure of Tayto Park now... Plus Dreamland as well <3