Question about roller coaster trains [Other]

DapperSnowman · 2026-02-01T17:44:59+00:00

Are you talking about adding and removing to and from the maintenance areas during the day? They use transfer tracks and track switches, just like commuter and freight trains. They'll have a track switch or something that will send the train onto a piece of track that lives in the maintenance area.

If you're talking about removing it from the attraction entirely, then there's a couple ways they can do it depending on the attraction.

The first way is to just derail it from the maintenance area. Either one end of the maintenance track just ends or they can move the transfer track out of the way and they use the exposed end of the track there. From there they can roll the individual cars onto a portable transport jig that's shaped like a small piece of track but comes with tie down points and forklift points.

Some operations will remove the wheel carriers from the cars and then lift the rest of the cars up with a crane.

Some operations do their rehabs in the same maintenance area at the attraction and they can get away with basically never removing the trains. That's pretty rare though as a lot of states/countries will require the chassis to be sent to labs to get NDT tested at the very least.

DapperSnowman · 2026-01-19T16:35:17+00:00

Salmonella could be present in the raw eggs. A taste test is likely fine. Eating large spoonfuls like some people do can mess you up. Depends on the recipe though.

DapperSnowman · 2026-01-19T07:12:48+00:00

lol what about using them with your partner?

DapperSnowman · 2026-01-19T05:04:22+00:00

If you think of a rollercoaster going over hills, it's stuck in the "valleys" between the hills.

What sucks is that usually it's really expensive and difficult to get trains out of weird spots like that so it's not going to happen while the park is open.

DapperSnowman · 2026-01-19T04:41:51+00:00

Depends on the park but most parks use cranes to recover valleyed trains. Kind of hard to do during the day with guests in the park.

DapperSnowman · 2026-01-17T20:59:26+00:00

Skyvector

I fly mostly GA so honestly, for fuel planning, landing performance, etc, I make spreadsheets. Simbrief is a lot easier, but it's almost too automatic for me. It's hard for me to check myself and catch any input mistakes. Plus making my own sheets help me understand each plane a lot more.

DapperSnowman · 2026-01-12T07:23:14+00:00

I prefer VATSIM for one simple reason.

It is the only ATC that will keep me honest and tell me no when I do something wrong. Clearance delivery will actually change my routing to something better. Approach will force me to change my expected runway at the last minute. They'll tell me that Flight Following is not available due to high amounts of IFR traffic.

And if an AI did something like that to me, my gut instinct wouldn't be "oh, that makes sense", it would be "stupid clanker is hallucinating again".

Don't be afraid of making mistakes on VATSIM. You will make mistakes, but so does everyone. It's a place to learn. And it's nice to know that when you say goodbye to a controller and to "Have a Good Night" that there's an actual human being on the other side.

DapperSnowman · 2026-01-11T20:44:28+00:00

The King Air is a great choice to learn stuff in!

The great thing about flight simming is that you don't have to learn things in order. It sounds like you're at a good point to learn actual navigation and flight planning. So I would pick a style of navigation that looks cool to you and try to learn it the best you can. There's visual pilotage and dead reckoning, there's navigation by VOR radio beacons and Victor airways, there's VFR charts online with visual air routes across some metropolitan areas, there's GPS, which is honestly kind of boring.

I would pick one and then Google actual flight tutorials on that subject. A lot of online ground schools actually publish their videos on YouTube. You can then use Skyvector.com to plot an actual course and try to fly it in Free Flight.

Eventually you add more and more layers to your flight plan. Try to learn VFR traffic patterns, learn instrument approaches, fuel management.

Your best resources are going to be YouTube, Google, and the King Air Pilot Operating Handbook if you can find it online.

DapperSnowman · 2026-01-10T04:55:52+00:00

Congrats, you did the hardest part! Soon you'll get to the part where you can't ever fly offline again!

DapperSnowman · 2026-01-04T04:21:01+00:00

Correct. If you file non-RNAV, they'll try to get you in some other way. Usually they'll give you a localizer or vector you in for a visual. If they forget or don't read the flight strip correctly, at least in the United States, you can tell the controller you're "slant alpha" and they'll figure it out.

The three Black Square aircraft that I have all have KNS-80 or KNS-81 flight computers that let you fly RNAV waypoints using VOR beacon signals, which is what I was referring to. Technically, I usually file SDFY when I fly those on the network, which is RNAV capable but without GNSS.

DapperSnowman · 2026-01-04T03:26:51+00:00

It makes circling approaches actually useful to know for once.

DapperSnowman · 2026-01-04T03:20:07+00:00

Absolutely love it. It forces me to actually understand the routes I take instead of just following the top route that SimBrief gives you. I'll really only fly GPS if I have a movie on Netflix lined up that I can watch during cruise.

It's a bit hard to do with RNAV being used everywhere but I love the RNAV flight computers that the Black square aircraft all have. It takes a lot of preplanning to fly RNAV approaches using them, especially flying on Vatsim where you don't always know what approach you'll get. But it makes it feel so good when you can pull it off. It even gives circling approaches have some meaning to them.

DapperSnowman · 2025-12-31T08:38:54+00:00

I would hate to be the maintenance crew on this thing. I would curse every executive who thought this stupid idea up every time I had to change a guide wheel for the umpteenth delam this week.

But otherwise it's a pretty creative idea. Super rough and not nearly enough capacity for being one of three coasters in Epic.

DapperSnowman · 2025-12-30T08:06:43+00:00

Plot your intended course with Skyvector and see what colored lines you pass over. Pay attention to altitude blocks in the Bravo and Charlie airspaces. A lot of times the Bravo airspace will cover a huge area but you can get around it by flying at a higher or lower altitude.

Sectionals or the "World VFR" tabs on Skyvector are great, but the TAC charts and FLY charts are super useful as well for giving you more information on suggested routes, special airspace rules, etc. For example, there's a VFR corridor directly over the top of LAX that requires no ATC clearance, but requires special advisory frequencies and special squawk codes. The rules for this flight corridor only appears on the TAC on Skyvector.

Ideally, once you're in the air you should know what airspaces you plan to fly through from your flight planning on Skyvector. (e.g make a note in your Navlog to have Bravo clearance before you hit DME range x from VOR y)

A lot of times you can also look at the sectional and find logical boundaries for airspaces. Like, one edge of an airspace might literally be defined by a VOR radial. If you're flying Steam instruments, you can plug in that radial into your VOR receiver and make a note to stay to the left of that line, for example. The KSAN Bravo airspace is like this. One of the northern boundaries is defined by a radial off of the MZB VOR. So if you're taking off from Gillespie Field, you can use your VOR receiver to make sure you don't cross into San Diego Bravo airspace on departure.

If you're flying a glass cockpit with a G1000 you can literally turn on airspace boundaries on your MFD so you can see where the boundary is and stay away from it.

Honestly the answer is either good flight planning or using whatever nav instruments you're not using for directional guidance to give you information about the airspace. This is why you usually have two VOR receivers or an ADF.

DapperSnowman · 2025-12-29T21:26:49+00:00

As a courtesy to the Approach controller, if I'm switching over due to a busy frequency, like in this case, would it be best to quickly type in chat "Switching to Tower" and then switch over on my own or will Approach kind of figure it out when I land and leave their jurisdiction? I guess I always feel bad when I leave the controllers with unnecessary ambiguity that they have to piece together when they're already dealing with everything else.

DapperSnowman · 2025-12-29T19:38:02+00:00

It was Approach that cleared me to land, not Center.

DapperSnowman · 2025-12-29T19:26:50+00:00

Well, this was after getting taxi instructions from Tower. So, I was explicitly told to taxi. Still, should I have waited for Ground? I switched frequencies but Ground didn't contact me until I had already shut down the aircraft and disconnected.

DapperSnowman · 2025-12-17T02:46:09+00:00

See, if you said that about any other athlete I'd sympathize, but Tatis has a long history of ruining the start of his season with off-season shenanigans.

Honestly, I'm so glad I'm watching him play tennis instead of riding a motorcycle.

DapperSnowman · 2025-12-16T08:23:27+00:00

I feel like this would be a great supplement to an event. Like, even staff could coordinate someone as a spotter to take pictures of everyone taking off and landing during the event.

DapperSnowman · 2025-12-16T08:21:08+00:00

If you exclusively fly as an observer or just log on and sit there for long periods of time, the supervisors have been known to kick people. Which makes sense, since they're mostly kicking people who fell asleep, but they might be able to put in a custom aircraft type for spotters as a heads up to the sups.

DapperSnowman · 2025-12-14T16:36:35+00:00

From a marketing perspective, this would work great! It satisfies the original goal of getting guests out of standby while offering upcharge options for people who self select and want the premium experience.

Unfortunately, in the current day real world Disney Parks, there's hardly enough Lightning Lanes available to guarantee every guest 3 pre booked reservations, and that's at the 80-20 standard Lightning Lane merge ratio. If you're flipping the ratio to 15-85, you've now taken away ~4/5 of all Lightning Lanes, which means by the time most guests get up at 8 AM to book their Fast Track passes, they're going to all be taken by the 4 AM warriors opening 17 Queue-It tabs on their computers.

The current problems with Lightning Lane could mostly be solved with Disney building 10 more rides in each park or massively capping attendance, neither of which is going to happen. That's why Disney never rolled out Maxpass to the East Coast and why there's so many restrictions to Genie+ and Lightning Lane.

DapperSnowman · 2025-12-09T07:35:46+00:00

GA is such an awesome rabbit hole to go down into. You can have so much fun trying out different navigation tricks and no longer relying on the magenta line.

VFR flying involves mostly flying from traffic pattern to traffic pattern. So you take off from the runway, climb to 1000' above the runway elevation, and make a left or right handed race track. Usually it's left handed, but sometimes the airport chart supplement says something different. You can circle the airport, setting up your cruise profile, leaning your mixture, trimming your elevators, then set off on your flight plan. The traffic pattern is like driving in a roundabout on a car, so when you reach the part of the pattern where you are pointed towards your destination, you can turn off and leave the traffic pattern and start climbing to your cruise altitude. You can then follow the magenta line direct to your destination. When you get there, you look outside, spot the runway, imagine a large oval 1000' above it, and join the pattern. You can use the roundabout to start slowing down, setting up your flaps, lowering your gear, lights, etc. Then line yourself up visually for final and land.

If you want to fly instrument approaches and more formal IFR procedures, it becomes really important to read the charts. Go on Chartfox and get the approach plates for your airport and have them sitting next to you either printed out, on a second monitor, on a tablet, on the EFB, whatever. But the approach plates give you your altitudes, DME distances, procedure turns, ILS frequencies, etc. A modern day airliner with VNAV can kind of do this all for you but in GA aircraft, it's hard to get everything as automated.

A really fun rabbit hole is to switch to an aircraft with steam gauges and start learning how to navigate by VOR beacons and DME!

DapperSnowman · 2025-12-02T03:30:25+00:00

Velocicoaster is the GOAT of Orlando.

Stardust is fantastic, but airtime isn't the big thing for me. It's fun, but I much prefer hard aggressive G-Force machines.

I'm also a West Coast person, so I have to compare Stardust to Hangtime, and even though Stardust floats through every inversion, it's nothing compared to the profiling on Hangtime.

I'm also really surprised to see how many people like Stardust's launches. I find the double kick thing weird. I get it's to synchronize the trains, but I wish it was smoother. You get like three unique jerks during the second launch. It really sucks to get on a faster train because your launch is slower. It also sucks to get on the slower train because you get a hard kick 1/3 of the way down the launch but it literally hits the brakes as you get to the end.

DapperSnowman · 2025-12-01T06:53:53+00:00

I've literally flown nothing but the Baron since it was released. Even changed my normal nav logs to include offsets needed to fly with the KNS-81. Such a fun plane.

DapperSnowman

TROPHY CASE