Mark9

You make it sound like Black Mamba's theming is like a gherkin in a McDonalds hamburger.

God imagine if they'd been like that on Airs open day in 2002. They'd be a new article every 10 minutes.

Yes, I'm sure Batman's concrete trenches are weeping with sadness right now.

I'm glad all these stories of rides being evacuated safely are major news now. It only reinforces the fact that rides at Alton Towers are safe and are run properly. You can just feel it in the Guardian and Mirror stories that they are desperate for something awful to happen. Their sadness that no one fell off to their deaths during an evacuation is almost tangible.

http://www.standard.co.uk/business/markets/jim-armitage-honourable-merlin-gives-a-lesson-in-responsibility-after-smiler-crash-10308001.html

It's amazing when you think how much Universal have had to throw at the parks to gain the growth whilst comparatively, Disney have done very little to grow their audiences. How much of Universals fortunes have been down to the Harry Potter franchise really interests me. I'm not a fan of Forbidden Journey but audiences lap it up like no other ride on earth.

Not really the main course of concern with four people still in hospital.

See, this is what the media do. Grab you with the headline, you think woah, Towers is so dangerous and then might not even read the rest. We'll ignore the facts or any of the article like "guests released safely after correct procedures followed" and just run with the sensationalism. The MAP holders who refer to themselves as 'loyal' and then demand extensions to their AP's, well the true loyalty is being shown by us on TPM, on Towers Street, on Towers Times, on any theme park forum. We've given Merlin hard times over the years but their commitment to safety and compassion to the families has been nothing but admirable and exemplary.

The way this story has snowballed over the last three days truly shows you the magnitude and seriousness of the crash. Saw, Fury and Rattlesnake being closed seems to now be the top story on BBC news at 6. I do feel like the fuss today from the media would not nearly be as big if Chessingtons coasters hadn't been closed. It seems to have made the story far larger and the media more critical of the way Merlin run their parks. The only positive I can get from this is seeing some great aerial shots of the parks in action.

Should have gone with the BBC. She's like this though, she doesn't have very much respect in the industry thankfully. Just another Murdoch mouth-piece.

You sound just like an internet troll with that kind of inane rubbish. A lot of the media stuff keeps going back to all its apparent problems in 2013. It gets journalists stuck, a simple breakdown. It stalled. Well so has Vampire, Dragons Fury, Colossus, Saw and Spinball, are they all executed badly investments as well? It threw a 'wheel' at someone, well bolts come off rollercoasters all the time, shall we get all those closed too. Staff following insufficient protocols. You can't prove any of that at all, that judgement is based on absolutely nothing and from what I can see, everyone involved with this incident has dealt with it with absolute professionalism. It's not an insensitive post, thats what people will be saying and thinking. I can't decide whether I think it's the right call for the park to make, however presumably they want to co-operate fully with the investigators and maybe it was their decision to keep the park closed until all rides have been checked over.

I guess the petition worked, I mean, it is closed after all.

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.

Thanks for that Stealthrider.

I know the GP have jumped to the worst conclusion. On here, we kind of know a bit about rides so I was hoping we wouldn't just throw blame at Alton's door. I want to throw something out there. When I operated Fury and Rattlesnake, rides with multiple cars, you wouldn't wait for each car to get back from an empty cycle before you start loading again. You'd wait for the first one to get back and then begin loading. As an operator you trust that the ride system will continue to keep cars out of the same block. Also with loading cars, it takes longer time then just sending out an empty train. On a ride like Nemesis you'd wait for the train to come back, that's obvious but with a ride that can run five trains it's not necessary to stack them all up before loading again. A few witnesses have said that a train was stuck on lift one for ten minutes before it finally made a move towards the crash. If thats true, why was the train able to continue towards the presumably vallied train.

We don't know that anything the park has done has let the people down. Lets not jump down the sensationalist route and automatically blame someone.

We don't know how many empty cars were sent out before they started loading again, all we have are eye witness accounts and some of these are very unreliable.

Shall we wait and see what is discovered and if any details are given into the public domain first. I don't have any doubts that The Smiler will open up again at some point in the future, maybe not this season but definitely in the next two years. I don't think we need to jump to conclusions about whether this was a Towers fault or a Gerstlauer fault. Merlin as a whole have a pretty exemplary record when it comes to ride incidents. I'm aware that things have happened but rarely ever down to the ride itself being at fault. We live in a world where no news is bad news and an incident like this may put a small minority off visiting. But for the rest of us, we'll still go. Think of all the rides around the world that have killed in the past, the rides in America ejecting riders or Big Thunder Mountain derailing in California. At this point, ten hours after the incident, the ride itself is secondary in my thoughts. Right now, I want to give my thoughts to the people involved, particularly the front row riders. I can't imagine the fear of heading towards that stationary train and being absolutely powerless to stop.

I wouldn't be surprised if Saw closes or a brief period, Spinball did the same during Fury's incident a few years back.

Had to mute that video. It's too distressing. Strange thing human nature, I knew what the video contained and yet couldn't resist looking.

Thoughts are with the people injured, lets hope they make a full recovery.

I loved those years. When the MTDP for Stealth and the 2009 coaster came out it was like nothing at Thorpe was impossible. That Inferno image is just