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The Smiler


th13teen

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If this was true, then every ride that was (in rather basic terms) simple in track and design, would never break down

Not never, thats just silly. Things will always fail, not everything is foreseeable, there are a lot of parts. I know this and all of what Stretchy said (mostly because he told me already!). But all the things you talk of a variations on tried and tested things, they aren't groundbreaking, and if the parts (or one in particular) coming together to make the ride work keep failing they haven't been designed or built well enough for their use have they?

My point is that this is not when they should be discovering these failures, these things they have got wrong. When it has been open for months and people are turning up and paying their money to ride it but finding it closed with such frequency something is very wrong with what has led up to this point. 'Sorry, it's new' doesn't cut it for me at this stage. If this stuff is all so groundbreaking (for Gerst / Alton, it is clearly not in the outside world and other manufacturers) there should have been unadvertised soft openings once it was clear pre season testing was not an option because they don't know how to dig a hole.

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It's been open for just over a month... So essentially it's had what, 36 days since opening, not all of which it has been open for various reasons... That is not months... Considering the rush to do it as well (which is not the fault of the ride manufacturer) because of the various other issues, no wonder they're having bugs in the system...

If it's still breaking down constantly in October, then yes fair enough, but it's barely had a month of operation...

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It's not 6 months after it opens it should work reliably (note reliably, not 100% as nothing ever can be), it is when it opens. What I am saying is the handling of everything, from the first signs of problems to right now, has been just about as bad as it could have been. These problems might not have been foreseeable then, because all is so revolutionary. I struggle to believe that and if the right people were working on it they could have got whatever is wrong right.

People are going now to ride The Smiler and quite regularly they can't. That's not good for customers, for reputation, for business or for anyone involved. It doesn't have to be like this and it should not be like this, if it was closed today during a preview period no one could have much of a problem with it, and if that is what it takes then that is what it should be.

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Well whatever was wrong with it - it's now back in operation with queues going back all the way to the towers - Joy! Looking forward to a couple of years time when I can start looking at it as part if the ride line up. Currently it's enjoy the park without the smiler and queue up just before the queue closes for the day

However the tickler, the hypnotiser and the flasher are not working!

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There was no chance of them having a preview period because of the delays though... Yes it should've been open in March for the park opening, but then those issues that came up during construction weren't forseen...

How can anyone forsee every potential problem? It's quite simply impossible to be able to predict every single issue that a ride can endure... I'm sure Intamin didn't expect their lapbars not to be able to hold in those of certain dimensions... I'm sure Arrow expected their brakes to fail on Pepsi Max... And so on and so forth with most ride breakdowns...

Machines break, especially complex ones... It's an unfortunate fact of life... Smiler is having teething issues just like Saw, Thirteen and Stealth... Hell, at least it's not Intimidator 305 which kept having issues because they didn't forsee that the wheels would go because of the high amount of friction and heat that took place on the ride...

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Ridden Smiler for the first time today (twice) and have to say its absolutely superb. The ride layout is impressive and immense and delivers many moments of weightlessness and overall delivers a well paced and constructed ride where no inversion used is wasted.

The ride I find find is rather smooth (which is from riding one of the rougher trains) plus the duelling motion (though a rare occurrence) is pretty impressive. Some say the ride doesn't have too much theming, but it isn't a big deal as the ride is very much the centrepiece especially as all the queue is around the ride area and very near by as well as interacting with the ride itself.

Overall, a brilliant ride which I strongly enjoyed and for me almost as good as the legendary Nemesis, 9.5/10.

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The Smiler is a good ride.

However.

I've now ridden it on 3 trains, 4 trains and 5 train operation and have queued exactly the same amount each time I've ridden. And I can honestly say I prefer it on three trains because at least back then, they weren't flooding the ride with fastrack's and the queue moved consistently.

The park have in their hands a fantastic ride which is long, enjoyable, fun and full of variety. But I don't want to ride it anymore and it says a lot on how much they are overselling fastrack itself when there is a 15 minute fastrack queue for Oblivion and they have half the ride to themselves as it is, on a ride that is supposed to get 1800 people an hour. Either the park has given up trying to run their rides properly or the overselling of fastrack has become so severe that the highest throughput rides in the park can no longer handle the fastrack allocation.

So for now, I'll stick with Nemesis and Air, as far away from The Smiler as it is because those two don't feel the effects of a ride that is being flogged beyond its reach.

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Went on Smiler yesterday, as Mark said, it is a good ride.

It opened late the the queue was stretching back in front of the towers so we decided to fastrack it, after being sent to 3 different places we eventually found where to buy fastrack.

We rode it at around 4 and my first ride was at the front, it was a fun ride, there are a couple of jolty bits but nothing to major.

We decided to ride it again at the end of the day too and we joined the external queue near the toilets at this point and it was awful, the ride often stacked all 5 trains (the whole thing even stopped for 10 mins with people on to deal with queue jumpers?) and it took us over 2 hours.

The queue gives nice views yea, but in the heat I found it pretty horrible and so enclosed, its not something id do in a hurry. This time we rode at the back which was quite different, it threw you around alot more not to the point where it hurt, but the jolts were much more noticeable, when you think Nemesis is 20 years old, I wouldn't like to imagine how this would ride in that time!

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Anyone else find that indoor section of queue seriously hot?

I can see them either having to install some form of air con or have to start batching people through so they dont have to spend to much time in there, it was horrible in there!

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Went on Smiler yesterday, as Mark said, it is a good ride.

It opened late the the queue was stretching back in front of the towers so we decided to fastrack it, after being sent to 3 different places we eventually found where to buy fastrack.

Out of interest, where do you buy fastrack?

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1000? How is it possibly that bad? And if it is that level of fastrack is disgusting.

If they are chosing to run their new ride at 800 pph they deserve any flack they are getting for the queues. And overall they deserve to be a failure.

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Ergh this doesn't surprise me because it did feel that long when I queued on sunday; it stacked so much on 4 I knew 5 wouldn't be an improvement.

Had a few discussions with Turtle, Mark9, Dan9, and we suggested that they should've had an offload platform.

And of course not sold a horrendous amount of fastback. Saw's opening year may have actually been better...

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Had a few discussions with Turtle, Mark9, Dan9, and we suggested that they should've had an offload platform.

The weird thing is, they have SPACE for one, so why they didn't think to put one in is interesting... Though really with the lack of seatbelts and reasonably quick changeover rate when it comes to loading/unloading I don't really think it would make THAT much of a difference to the overall throughput and timings personally...

I sense the high sales of Fastrack are purely down to the money the park didn't get due to the later opening... As I've said before, their sales teams aren't very good when it comes to selling Fastrack...

I think the amount of blocks might be the limiting factor towards the throughput, since really you can only have 3 trains actually on the track at any time... So as per any Gerstlauer we'll never really see an amazing throughput level...

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Smilers throughputs are absolutely awful - their best they've got is just over 1000.

And they sell fastrack on it, at 200 per hour.

Ridiculous.

Maximum number of dedicated fast tracks sold currently have been 40 per hour not 200.

You can also access Smiler on some of the unlimited fast passes but the sale of those is seriously limited.

Throughput is circa 1200 on an average session according to ride staff, raising to 1300 if swift dispatch.

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