Fred on 4D coaster
Wednesday, July 26th, 2006Thanks for the update!
yeah. basically, it was worth the wait, in the end. the ride is very well designed, smooth as a baby’s bottom, no jostling, no sudden changes from one element to the next (recall XLR-8), and very natural changes from, say, facing backward, flying inverted, track sideways, low-ish g’s, to facing forward, scooping down and back up through a very high-g valley.
but i don’t recommend trekking all the way to fuji-q just yet; wait a while, so the line will be less and they might be running more trains. for instance, x has no braking sections, giving a maximum of 2 trains (3 if you can have one on the lift hill?) (see below). yesterday, they had only one train of 7 cars, 4 per car, and a total turnaround time of 7 minutes, perhaps longer. so while the published capacity is 1600 riders per hour, magic mountain was getting maybe 400, max. idiots. one of the operators said there was only one train available! i pointed out the six cars sitting on the ground behind the station, and he said they were just parts.
i was unimpressed with magic mountain. i have never seen a park more empty, nor more inefficiently run. i mean, they had only one train on the damn track, despite the “getting off” place being different from the “getting on” place. that is only one of several examples. another: they had a “fast pass” for $15 per 4 passes, where you go in the out door, and skip the line. at some rides (tatsu) no one was even checking cause there were almost no “fast passers”, yet four
whole rows were reserved for “fast pass” only. at one ride (psyclone?) the operator let in the passers (a 30-45 second delay) after the cars were full, but before she had checked the safety harnesses. so every fast passer caused a thirty second delay for every single person in line. this happened basically every train.
also, she wouldn’t let me just go sit in an empty seat.
if i had it to do again, i would have ridden X first, before the park had time to fill, instead of saving it for last, and i would have gotten up sooner, in order to have had time to ride riddler’s revenge, which, i think is a duplicate of one of my favorite rides, raptor, at cedar point. (when i stopped by the first time, it was having trouble, and after i’d waited so long for X, i couldn’t wait for riddler’s revenge.)
a final note: maybe it was the shitty park food, and maybe it was the lack of water, but i kind of felt increasingly nauseated during some of the rides. am i getting old, or out of practice?
oh yeah: if you ride tatsu, or a ride like tatsu, do not wear glasses.
but you probably knew that.