Chitown wrote:Batman The Ride at Six Flags St. Louis.
What a ridiculous ass long que line. They created no shortcuts so unless you start hopping rails, you are walking through a long dragged out line.
^This. I thought it was ridiculous how you have to walk through the switchbacks on the Gotham Park walkway for a full 3 minutes just to get to the back of the line, then you meander all over the place in line, moving right next to the station building, then heading away from it again, only to eventually turn around and come back toward it. SFGAm got their B:TR queue right, with the shortcut options.
[jonrev] wrote:namtaB at St. Louis for sure... with Boss at a close-second.
The thing with The Boss is that the ride is back in the hills, so it makes more sense there's a long queue, though it is long. Batman is right there near the entrance of the ride, just like at SFGAm, but the queue meanders all over the place, unnecessarily.
On the topic of queue paths Scream at SFMM's is just a staircase that leads into the station. What's even funnier is that it's never full. A large B&M that would be one of the most popular rides at any other park, yet never has a line at SFMM, even in 2003 when it opened it never had lines.
There wasn't even any big deal about it opening either. It was probably the most "meh whatever, check it out" ride opening ever. Even though it was just a Medusa mirrored clone, it is still a huge investment. It's not like it was a boomerang or something weak.
^It's to bad that coaster is so negleted at SFMM. There were so many other park's at the time that Scream was built that could have benifited from it so much more than SFMM.
I'm pretty sure that Kingda Ka's queue is crazy long as well. I was going to get in line before I realized how long it really was, and went to get a flash pass.
Jerrykoala2112 wrote:I'm pretty sure that Kingda Ka's queue is crazy long as well. I was going to get in line before I realized how long it really was, and went to get a flash pass.
A funny story about Kingda Ka's line, in 2005 they would issue tickets when you entered the line in order to prevent line jumping (they weren't the tickets like at SFGAm that are large pieces of paper, they were just regular "admit one" tickets). They also had a rope that led from the rides entrance a long way down near the entrance of Golden Kingdom, where they were handing out the tickets, however the line was inside of the normal entrance and the rope/extended queueing was not necessary at the time. So naturally many people that entered the line did not enter where the rope ended/where they were handing out tickets, people went under the rope and proceeded through the normal entrance.
So when they were about to go to the station at the ticket collection point around 1/4th of the people got turned away after they waited an hour or so in line even though they did not cut at all. And the employees/security either could not figure out or had no interest at all in why this was happening, and just kept sending everyone away.
We realized what was going on after about 30 minutes of waiting in line, followed the rope all the way to where they were handing out tickets, got back in line and waited again (dealing with a few breakdowns of course), then when we were about to go in the station the ride broke down for the night and everyone was cleared from the queue. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ytCEuuW2_A
The next day we finally got on Kingda Ka once, though it opened late. Though every ride opened late that day since it was drizzling in the morning when the park opened so all of the rides had signs that the ride was closed for weather at their entrances with no employees in sight so people were just forming lines in front of rides hoping that at some point one would open, the ignorant ones that did not know Kingda Ka's reliability got unlucky as it did not open until several hours after all of the other coasters did.
So then to top it all off a few years later we go back to GADV, Kingda Ka breaks down while we are in line. For some reason the most unreliable ride in the world does not have a way to announce downtimes in the queue, so about 10 minutes after it goes down they send an employee into the queue to announce the downtime. Knowing from past experience that they only send the person into the queue to announce a downtime if they know its going to be very long, we said screw this and left the queue, which turned out to be smart because it was down for the rest of the night. So I have been to GADV 3 days, probably gotten in line for Kingda Ka 5 times or so, and ridden it once.
BP/19 wrote:No way Scott, Batman THE LINE is the best attraction at SFSTL!!! It's the main thing I look forward to when going. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqH_z-QgvzU
GEEZ! That's insane. I don't mind much of the excessive switchbacking as long as there's a shortcut, but the extreme long hikes like these I can't stand.
Jerrykoala2112 wrote:I'm pretty sure that Kingda Ka's queue is crazy long as well. I was going to get in line before I realized how long it really was, and went to get a flash pass.
A funny story about Kingda Ka's line, in 2005 they would issue tickets when you entered the line in order to prevent line jumping (they weren't the tickets like at SFGAm that are large pieces of paper, they were just regular "admit one" tickets). They also had a rope that led from the rides entrance a long way down near the entrance of Golden Kingdom, where they were handing out the tickets, however the line was inside of the normal entrance and the rope/extended queueing was not necessary at the time. So naturally many people that entered the line did not enter where the rope ended/where they were handing out tickets, people went under the rope and proceeded through the normal entrance.
So when they were about to go to the station at the ticket collection point around 1/4th of the people got turned away after they waited an hour or so in line even though they did not cut at all. And the employees/security either could not figure out or had no interest at all in why this was happening, and just kept sending everyone away.
We realized what was going on after about 30 minutes of waiting in line, followed the rope all the way to where they were handing out tickets, got back in line and waited again (dealing with a few breakdowns of course), then when we were about to go in the station the ride broke down for the night and everyone was cleared from the queue. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ytCEuuW2_A
The next day we finally got on Kingda Ka once, though it opened late. Though every ride opened late that day since it was drizzling in the morning when the park opened so all of the rides had signs that the ride was closed for weather at their entrances with no employees in sight so people were just forming lines in front of rides hoping that at some point one would open, the ignorant ones that did not know Kingda Ka's reliability got unlucky as it did not open until several hours after all of the other coasters did.
So then to top it all off a few years later we go back to GADV, Kingda Ka breaks down while we are in line. For some reason the most unreliable ride in the world does not have a way to announce downtimes in the queue, so about 10 minutes after it goes down they send an employee into the queue to announce the downtime. Knowing from past experience that they only send the person into the queue to announce a downtime if they know its going to be very long, we said screw this and left the queue, which turned out to be smart because it was down for the rest of the night. So I have been to GADV 3 days, probably gotten in line for Kingda Ka 5 times or so, and ridden it once.
Real estate wise it's pretty average, although if I remember right there are extra hidden queue houses that extend like halfway down the launch track which would make it significantly longer. The ride actually has stellar capacity (or at least is designed to) but it seems to be extremely unreliable when trying to run more than 3 trains so i'm pretty sure they don't run both stations anymore.
