Testing?

With Valravn being brand new, most likely Valravn will be the first ride to run this season. Testing will begin around the first week of April. Most other rides won't begin testing until their crews get in for the season around the first of May. Maintenance crews may run each ride one cycle before then though

Makes sense. In my opinion, they should test Rougarou first because the Rougarou is going to start getting anxious and start howling on the midway. Lol

The rides are tested and perfected long before the crews arrive. The crews aren't there to test the rides. They're there to be trained on how to operate them.

My random guess is March 18th ;)

There is no advantage to beginning preseason ride cycling weeks early because of the nice weather. Maintenance will begin cycling the rides when they are ready. And they will do more than "one cycle" before the ride crews arrive for training, trust me.

Cartwright said:

There is no advantage to beginning preseason ride cycling weeks early because of the nice weather. Maintenance will begin cycling the rides when they are ready. And they will do more than "one cycle" before the ride crews arrive for training, trust me.

I agree. Rides need so many hours / cycles before the general public is allowed to go on them. They actually start testing before the majority of ride crews get there in early to mid - May.

Rides will be tested and recertified each year by the state of Ohio. Each ride has to run for a certain amount of cycles per ride unit. Usually in April is when that happens. However, Valravn will more than likely be tested before that. Possibly at the end of this month

It's too bad that they cannot start the rides up early due to nice weather. Think of how many hours you could do If that were the case. Oh well, I have faith that Rougarou will start testing as the first roller-coaster besides Valravn in the month of April.

I don't think starting early saves any time. They typically have this stuff planned out months in advance.

Employees don't start coming until late March/early April. It's hard to start testing all rides without the proper staffing

Carowinds has just recently started their track inspections for the season and I would assume testing will begin within a day or two after a ride passes track inspection. The weather has been nice down there for over a month now. So, based on their time frame I'd say early April we will see inspections followed by testing for the existing rides. I would imagine we could see Valravn undergo its inspection and testing a week or so before the rest of the rides.

campfreak06 said:
The rides are tested and perfected long before the crews arrive. The crews aren't there to test the rides. They're there to be trained on how to operate them.

Are you sure about that? I actually work at the park, and yes the crews are trained on how to operate the ride at that time, but in the week leading up to opening day the ride crews themselves are the ones doing the cycling that needs to be done before anyone is allowed to ride them.

I couldn't imagine that CP has enough maintenance staff to sit around and test all the rides by themselves without the ride crews.

They don't do it at the same time, obviously, but every ride is tested by maintenance and goes through various checklists and procedures long before ride crews arrive for training. The training time gives the ride plenty of hours of required cycle time, but maintenance absolutely has a large staff who can fire up the rides and put them through the motions without ride crews.

Also, it doesn't take a full crew to cycle a ride. In most cases now, it might take a few people if there are multiple enable buttons to be pressed, but they probably often have maintenance mode to override that anyway so it may only take one person to cycle a ride coaster.

To be honest, I don't know how many hours maintenance puts on a ride before they hand it over to operations. I know when I worked there, the week before the park opened, we cycled the ride for a few hours on at least a couple different days. But at that point, it was already state certified, we were able to let people test ride, etc. So I wasn't there for the very early testing. I've heard some rumors of 100 cycles per train being required and that can be accomplished in about 4 hours on most CP coasters. I'm guessing most rides have far more than is required on them by opening day. Although who knows with the way some opening days have gone in terms of downtime... :)

^ depending on how many ride units are on said ride, I can't remember if it is 50 or 100 cycles PER ride unit. So 150-300 dispatches typically for rides running 3 trains.

I'll also just add that most cycling is done with the crews while training. That's how it worked under both SF and CF management at Geauga Lake. As big as maintenance departments are they just don't have the man power to do all the cycling needed. Also some rides won't even be inspected and signed off by the state until a day or two before opening day. I can remember a few seasons where we were getting state sign offs the morning OF opening day. This usually happened if a ride went down mechanically and it wasn't fixed in time during state inspection and had to be repaired before being signed off.

Last year, some still weren't certified by opening day.

I hope for the sake of those of you planning on going on Opening Day that they've got a better handle on things this year. Geebus pleabus, last year was a cluster.

Preview night last year left a bad taste in my mouth. No more of those for me. I'm sticking with going on May 8th this year. Day 2 was alot better in terms of crowds and uptime last year, plus that's my birthday this year. I can wait a day or two.