Compare and Contrast

[lokheed]

The Difference Between Maintenance at Disneyland and Disney World

Disneyland:
Two cast members and multiple guests notice an unusual rattling, metal-on-metal noise on Big Thunder Mountain Railroad. A full thirty minutes later, the ride operator is planning to take that train out of operation "after the next run". Before that happens a bogey assembley suffers a catastrophic failure resulting in one guest fatality and at least ten additional guests injured.

Disney World
While riding Snow White's Scary Adventure for the first time today I noticed that the magic mirror was broken. It's just a simple lighting effect, and either the projector was not powered up or the lamp on the projector was burned out. While this certainly effects the quality of the ride, there is absolutely no risk of guests being injured due to this problem. I mentioned the problem to a cast member as we exited the ride, and then Ben took me around to stand in line to ride it again. Within five minutes of my telling the cast member, a maintenance worker was on site. Shortly after that, two additional cast members who appeared to be managers also arrived to go on the ride and take a look at the problem. Since it was obviously not a safety issue and the park was crowded, they elected to keep the ride running until later that evening during the fireworks show. Once the fireworks were over the ride re-opened and the magic mirror was fixed.

In Other News:
While we were on the Tomorrowland Transit Authority today, we had the rare treat of going through Space Mountain with all the lights on. I'm not sure what was wrong with ride (my cynical side guesses that either a cast member or a guest heard an unusual metal-on-metal rattling sound, and the ride was closed immediately). In any case, it was pretty dang cool to see the whole thing all lit up.

I also got to go on the Carousel of Progress for the first time ever. Ben was not particularly impressed, but at least he didn't go completely ballistic either. I elected not to even attempt The Timekeeper. Maybe tomorrow. Both of those attractions are normally only open on holidays when there are exceptional crowds, but with Alien Encounter going away they will both be running pretty much full time to take up the slack. You hear that Disneyland? When you are losing ride capacity for a prolonged period (read: Space Mountain) it's a good idea to open other attractions to maintian overall capacity. <sarcasm>That's what we call good planning.</sarcasm>