Ian-S

That's not the way the world works.

My wife just told me to stop watching the news cos I kept shouting at the TV whenever they were saying that LOL.

For the love of God will someone tweet the BBC and tell them the empty car didn't get stuck at the top of a 'loop' and the collision didn't happen there either, for a supposedly professional organisation they really haven't proof read the ****ing script or thought about things logically.

Rides like Fury, Rattlesnake, Saw and Spinball have multiple block brakes (it's just like RCT3!! Yay) which allow multiple cars to be on the track, one in each block section.Fury for example has 5 block brakes out on the track (including the second lift), these are the flat sections that the cars travel straight through. Should the power fail, all brakes lock shut and each car is stopped out on its nearest block point.
The ride also has multiple speed settings depending on how many cars are on the track, so with maximum number of cars the chain lifts and drives will all speed up slightly to ensure staff can still send out cars every 10 seconds without having to wait longer for the next block to be free.
I also *think* there is a sensor before the horseshoe on Fury that the car must pass in order to send the next one. This way even if the car ahead magically stalls despite the laws of physics, the one you've just sent is guaranteed to have not made it past the lift hill - therefore can be easily and automatically stopped.
Usually these systems are watertight and that's why The Smiler's case is so bizarre

Electricbill has it kind of spot on. The block areas start from the first drive in the break run. The start of the ride from a cycle point of view is the drive before the alignment gate. So you have drive 1 where the car initially hits the break run. Drive 2 and 3 are the alignment gate itself. Drive four is the transfer track. during wet weather, the reason the ride goes down to two people per car is because the cars can slip through drive four and collide with the car sitting on drive 5, the first one in the station. Drive 6,7,8 are the middle of the station and drive 9 is the dispatch.
 
The dispatch cycle doesn't speed up the rides lift chain and drives, what it does is determine how often cars are dispatched to allow a consistent operation. What you don't want on say a five car operation is all five cars going round together and then nothing in the station. With all cars going round together as it were, you're more likely to encounter a block shutdown. For those interested, the car has 9 dispatch cycles and the general rule of thumb is on a seven car operation the ride would be put onto the eight car cycle. On the 9 car setting you can dispatch a car the moment the previous car has reached the top of the lift hill. The eight car cycle allows you to dispatch a car when the previous car is at the bottom of the first drop. There isn't a sensor at the immelman (or at least there wasn't in 2009)
 
Rattlesnake is a little more primeval, a dispatch can be allowed when a green light on the console lights up. That ride is far more up to operator discretion as to when a car can be dispatched. 
 
#geek.

A helicopter is standard, you shouldn't let that upset you. After all, a helicopter was hovering over a Chinese cruise liner which sunk on the very same day as the Smiler incident. The difference is that the Cruise liner may have cost 500 lives, the Smiler incident only 16 and majority weren't life threatening injuries. It's interesting how when something is closer to home and within the realm of own experience, how much more affecting it can be.
 
 
You have to bear in mind that at 19 you can get married, be a parent, drive a car, drink alcohol. And trust me driving a car on the M25 during rush hour is harder and more scary then pressing a dispatch button on The Smiler. The only ride I've ever come across that takes physical skill to operate correctly is Rattlesnake. I'm not saying a 19 year old is mature enough to deal with an emergency on this scale but when I think about it, I've also met 45 year olds who wouldn't have been able to deal with this situation. 
 
When it comes to it, would I go to Alton Towers and ride the Smiler again? In a shot. This is a freak accident and doesn't make me question whether Merlin (Or any park with the exception of Bakken) run their rides properly.

I'm just catching up with the news as I've been away for the past couple of days, sadden & shocked.
 
My thoughts are with those all involved with yesterday incident, friends, families, workers... I stood disbelief when I received the text, it was only Sunday I was speaking about getting back on The Smiler, I'm very shaken by this.
 
The media coverage has been disgusting, air helicopter zooming in on those poor helpless guest.
 
Words cannot express how distressing this has been for the park, the families, the guest having the witness the incident, the community & Merlin. 
 
Lets hope the park can re-open as quickly as possible... as for the future of The Smiler. 

^ I'm usually antisocial anyway.

It got stuck at the top of the loop because gravity! 

There was quite an interesting article released from The Guardian today that rollercoasters really aren't as dangerous as people make them out to be and you are certainly more likely to be injured from another everyday cause than riding a rollercoaster. Here's the article, I can't say statistics used are genuinely correct however it's an interesting read:
"Sometimes being scared is half the fun. That’s certainly the case when it comes to rollercoasters: the adrenaline rush we ride them for is all the wilder for the slight panic many of us feel as the carriage makes its slow climb to the top as the ride begins.
Such fear is made real by the fact that the rides do, on rare occasions, go very wrong. This week’s accident on the Smiler ride at Alton Towers thankfully had no fatalities, but left 16 injured, four of them seriously, and has led to the park remaining closed on Wednesday and Thursday.
But how dangerous are rollercoasters? There isn’t a good, comprehensive answer on this – no one collects global statistics, and it’s also not fair to compare a rickety coaster in a travelling fair to a state-of-the-art fixed coaster. It is fair to say that they are broadly pretty safe, though: much like plane accidents, every rollercoaster crash is news – precisely because they are quite rare.
The International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions – maybe not a totally unbiased source – wants to reassure you that parks are really quite safe. It gathered statistics based on the number of injuries per million activity days, and found that for rides in theme parks, there were eight injuries for each million days. By contrast, playing (American) football was 40 times more dangerous, at 343 injuries, and even fishing was far riskier, at 88 injuries per million days.
Such figures tie in with a broader truth: what we are scared of isn’t what is going to kill us. Driving, cycling, climbing the stairs or smoking a cigarette are all dangerous, but it’s a rare person who recoils in terror from a daily task. Murderers, plane rides and spiders all seem far scarier by contrast.
This familiarity bias makes us bad at the risks we face in daily life. One approach to try to quantify such dangers is the “micromort” – a term for a one-in-a-million chance of death. Professor David Nutt famously got into trouble for noting, correctly, that taking ecstasy had about the same risks as going horse riding (0.5 micromorts each).
A 200-mile motorbike trip (roughly London to Manchester) is about as dangerous as serving a day of active duty for UK forces in Afghanistan was, at around 33 micromorts each. And your risk of being murdered on a mile-long walk home from work is about 20 times smaller than your being hit by a car as you walk – but even knowing that, the former stays scarier.
So the good news is that what you are scared of almost certainly won’t kill you. The bad news – you knew it was coming – is that it’s what you feel fine about that will. The drive to the airport is more likely to kill you than the flight – and your diet, your drinking or your ageing body, is far more likely to do so than either.
A final figure for you: if you are reading this in the UK, your average chance of dying today, from any cause, is one in 41,667. So, ah, good luck out there, guys."

Nearly everybody have asked me today whether I'm still going in the couple weeks, my answer is of course if the park is open I'll be there, one said they would never go on another rollercoaster to which I responded I hope you've cancelled your holiday in Spain then because you're going to have to get on a plane to get there and they crash too, it instantly shut them up and bought them back to earth from the media hysteria.

Nearly everybody have asked me today whether I'm still going in the couple weeks, my answer is of course if the park is open I'll be there, one said they would never go on another rollercoaster to which I responded I hope you've cancelled your holiday in Spain then because you're going to have to get on a plane to get there and they crash too, it instantly shut them up and bought them back to earth from the media hysteria.

Nearly everybody have asked me today whether I'm still going in the couple weeks, my answer is of course if the park is open I'll be there, one said they would never go on another rollercoaster to which I responded I hope you've cancelled your holiday in Spain then because you're going to have to get on a plane to get there and they crash too, it instantly shut them up and bought them back to earth from the media hysteria.

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...

Sounds like everybody did an fantastic job given the circumstances.
I hope Merlin look after their staff and don't just brush them aside (I don't mean financially), paramedics and firemen are trained to cope in such situations, but a kid barely out of school in their first job, doubtful.

If it's correct that Train 2 (the full one) was on the lift hill for 10 minutes whilst train 2 (the empty stalled one) was stalled, then why didn't they evacuate queue etc straight away? I may be wrong, but don't they have to evacuate the area, get a crane in and take the empty stalled car off the track that way? But people were still joining the queue after the car had stalled.
 
This makes me think maybe that they hadn't realised the car was stalled after that inversion?

Thing is, Towers closed X Sector multiple times when Smiler stalled there and during construction so they're willing to do that (which will presumably happen for a few days any way if the park does open tomorrow). You can check all the rides in as much detail as you want, if this was purely a computer glitch then it might not have been able to foresee, it could well have just happened out of nowhere. It's like getting your car serviced, it can feel fine for a week then the next minute the head gasket goes or something.
 
Staff get used to being asked loads of questions, on our BTS of Smiler our staff member told us about the wheel incident when it was just a rubber sealant thing, not a wheel. Just something that runs along the chain so they already were pestered with questions. 
 
Remember when Rita's cable snapped? That's a major thing to happen, just look at Xcelerator. But it happened luckily out of park hours. If that happened with people on and in the area it would get just as much press as this. But Joe Bloggs doesn't know about it, because no one could tweet it and get the prying eyes of the press in. Basically, you can check a ride as much as you want and give it the best maintenance but if it's going to break, it'll break.

I'm sure the powers of Gurst and Merlin have a pretty good idea of how this incident happened already, I'd imagine if it is something that could be repeated under the same circumstances on Saw (or other Eurofighters/Enigmas) they'll close for whatever upgrade is necessary.
I'm also sure if they don't have to shut Saw then they won't, the last thing they'd want is for the media or public to link the Smiler event with other rides; it'll be damaging enough for Towers without it tarnishing other parks in the public's mind.

Id love to see a video of the bit where it stops on inversion 5 before being released. It's almost like they make this stuff up.

This happened while I was at work and I've only caught a few snippets of it throughout the evening. It is just shocking, something that should never ever occur. It's mind boggling that it has been able to. Thoughts have to be with those injured, that witnessed it, the staff that responded and the emergency service workers, who all must have seen some sights today, things that will live with each and every one of them for years to come. 
 
Without going through all of what has gone before, I've noticed some comment about it being disrespectful to speculate about how this has happened and what the consequences will be. I can't see there's anything particularly wrong with this as long as it is done in a respectful and non sensationalist way. None of us can know what has happened, so lets not think we do, but it is human nature to want to understand.
 
When I first heard about it I presumed it was a break run coming together at low speed. I realised it was something more serious when I first saw the video now about half way down the BBC website article; the force that must have been involved to move that stationary ride vehicle so far along the inclined track must be huge. Sadly I fairly regularly see the results of high speed impacts first hand through RTC's and the like at work and my first thought was that the front row would all have very serious leg impact injuries, or most probably losses. Having since seen the pictures and video from other angles it seems the front of the laden carriage is pretty well embedded into the back of the other one. I fear the DM article will turn out to be accurate and I would expect more bad news to come.
 
As for how it can have happened, I'm sure it will have been a culmination of a series of errors rather than a single thing. It should be very difficult indeed to put the system into a position where this is possible with or without passengers. The first thing I thought as odd was towards the end of that same BBC video as the camera pans away it shows that there was another stalled train on the second half of the track, so two stalls at once. Could it be possible that the first stall has triggered a shut down, the second stall has happened simultaneously, so when it has come to the evac the operators have decided to move the train on from the first lift hill to get it to the vertical lift brake run rather than evacuate at height, thinking they were only dealing with the second stall? That would account for an element of system override human error coupled with a system allowing something that should not be allowed that I think will both be present. Just a theory. I struggle to think of another logical series of events that make it possible. I'm pretty sure the full details will come out in the coming weeks. 
 
I wonder what The Smiler has actually cost towers beyond the build cost? A whole season of disruption, other bad press incidents and now this. I've  no doubt it'll open again at some point, but would be surprised if it was this season, and when it does I wonder what restrictions they will place on number of cars on track, will it be forever on a reduced capacity? The H&S executive investigating officers will have locked the site down for now, until it's released back to the park and they are able to remove the trains I'd expect the whole of X Sector to be closed. I think the park have handled this just about as well as they could have done since it occurred and I hope they continue with their honesty and display of genuine remorse, I'm sure it will help a lot in regaining the publics trust of the brand

Not a go at you cos you're just the messenger but I'd have thought getting the people off the ride is the priority rather than calling the after sales warranty support hotline...

Varney' appearance is now on the Sky News article: http://news.sky.com/story/1494944/carriages-crash-on-alton-towers-smiler-ride

Any compensation settlements would likely involve non-disclosure clauses and about 50 thousand other clauses, they will get a bundle, but I don't think they'd have got something sorted this quick.

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-32980354
Remember, it's always worth taking things from social media with a big pinch of salt, especially if it's someone claiming to be related to an injured guest.

Michael Bay called, he wants his green screen back.