Efteling visitors were stuck in the roller coaster Vogel Skirt last Wednesday. The train did not sail enough and rolled back to the lowest point. The cause would be a broken wheel and that sounds serious.
The passengers in the train were stuck for almost 45 minutes, while the carts hung in the bend in a 90 -degree angle. Many people with all kinds of theories respond to social media. Especially people who are not so fond of roller coasters, see their fear confirmed. However, amusement park expert Danny van der Weel thinks that there was not much going on.
He is a manager at Family Park Drievliet in The Hague and previously worked at Adventure Park Hellendoorn. On his YouTube channel Theme Park Science he previously dedicated a long video especially on the wheels of the bird skirt.
“A wheel of the bird skirt really doesn’t just break. Then three protections would fail and that really doesn’t happen, “he knows. “Every day the wheels are controlled by feeling, visibility and wear.”
Van Weel suspects that two things may have happened. “A bearing of a wheel may have broken, but I rather think it went wrong with the coating around one of the steel wheels,” he says. “It may well be that there was a crack in that coating and that that coating eventually broke at the end of the day. That inhibits that wheel and therefore the train no longer achieved a higher point in the track and rolled back. ”
According to Van Weel, the speed of a roller coaster listens very closely. “The train should not go too fast, but not too slow. If you go too fast, you get too high G-forces and if you go too slowly, you don’t get the end of the job. ” According to Van Weel, the bird skirt normally runs around 40 to 50 kilometers per hour at the point where the train dropped.
Between whether or not to get a slope there is perhaps only 5 kilometers per hour difference, Van Weel knows. “You see that the bird skirt has thought about what should happen if the train does not reach the relatively high point in the middle of the track. Then it rolls back to the bend in front that is almost on the floor. People can get out of there easily. ”
In the end it took 45 minutes for everyone to get out of the train. According to Van Weel, that makes sense because it takes a while for everyone. In the end he thinks that little was going on: “If a wheel had really been demolished, the bird skirt would not have opened immediately the next morning.”