Monday, April 25, 2011

First Successful Test Run - 4/25/2011

It was a big day at the Bay Beach Zippin Pippin Roller Coaster site today. For the first time a train was loaded onto the tracks, weighed down with ballast and completed a successful run of the track. After the first successful run several more runs were made including two with two passengers each. I was on site for the testing and was able to get some good video of the action. I'm uploading the best videos of the days activities, the first video is now on-line and linked below. Keep checking back, I will be uploading other videos and still pictures from the days testing.



A second video is now available, see it below. This video was taken from the South side of the coaster looking North, the opposite side from the first video. I believe this was the fifth dry run for the coaster.



In other news the opening date for the coaster has been pushed back two weeks. Mother nature simply threw too many turns into the testing part of the schedule, less then a week ago the Green Bay area received about 9" of fresh snow preventing a lot of the final preparation work at the site from finishing up and delaying the testing you are seeing above. To launch the coaster per the original schedule training for workers to run the coaster would have to be going on now instead of the very first initial test runs. To make matters even worse the weather for the balance of this week looks bad with rain and cool temperatures in the forecast. The new opening day is now May 21st. The countdown clock on this site has been updated with the new date.

2 comments:

  1. hmmm, the out and back part looks really slow, it looks like the coaster is just barely making it up the hills, do you think it will be faster with 30 passengers inside?

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  2. They did have sand bags in the cars. I think it was more an issue of low temperatures (temp's were in the mid 40's and the wheel grease tends to get thick and slow things down) it was also the first time those trains have been run in a while. They've been in storage for several years.

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