When i did ironwork we would nap on the catwalk about 200 feet up in the air at a mill we were working at. We'd tie off to keep from rolling off if we rolled over though. 😂 This one dude would even make a hammock out of an extra harness and a couple cheaters and just hang under the cat walk. He was a laid off rescue climber. The human will to sleep is strong.
I'm not even a ride tech or anything, just a ride enthusiast, but i enjoy these videos! Also youtube tip: either in the description or a pinned comment, leave links to parts 1 & 2 :) Might get more people to watch them after this ;)
Where to begin? 🤣🤣🤣🤣 That sums it up. I used to love watching the uncomfortable looks on higher ups faces when inspectors or people they wanted to impress started talking with me. 😂 We got along great them not so much.
Two for you, from the world of tourist trains ... 1. Come around a curve, standing in an open air car (as conductor), there's an absolutely thunderously loud BANG! People look at me, I look at them, and casually as I can key my radio to the engineer : "Edmund, what was that?" "That's what I'd like to know" .......... yeah, just what you want to hear from your engineer surrounded by passengers. We stop, and about halfway down the train there's this giant boulder. like 2'x3'x3'. Massive. Luckily for us, the GP9 leading the train came from up north and had a snowplow blade. That rock didn't even scratch the paint. Figuring half the train had already gotten past the diverted chunk of granite, we crawled the rest of the train past it, and it officially became Someone Else's Problem (tm) to deal with. 2. Sitting at the station, we get a call from 911. It's never a good thing when 911 calls YOU, vs you calling THEM. Truck has can opener-ed itself (like a sardine can) on the underside of the bridge over the river. 911 wants to know what we're gonna do. "Uhhhhh, we're not doing anything until someone inspects that bridge"
I was at the Isle of Man in 2022 for the big race, and wanted to ride the Manx Electric Railway to Ramsey. I was sitting in the back car, fairly close to the back where the conductor and controls were. As we got about halfway up the first hill, there was an incredibly loud bang and massive blue flash from the rear by where the conductor was sitting. We come to a dead stop and the conductor calmly calls down the the station on the radio to send a mechanic up. Come to find out one of the traction motors flashed over and the DC breaker (circa 1905ish) by the conductor's station had tripped. Some inspection and a breaker reset later , we were on our way again. I asked the conductor how often that happened, and why he didn't jump when it did. He calmly (and in typical UK aplomb) said "It happens about twice a week, and I'm used to it." It was a fun ride and on the return trip nothing bad happened. :)
@@mxslick50 most electric railways (unless you're Amtrak) run on either 600 or 750v DC. At absolutely prodigious levels of current consumed. eg, entire substations worth. You trip a breaker on that, it's like a literal lightning bolt induced thunderclap.
@@litz13 According to the Manx Electric Railway Society, the Manx Railway runs on 500v (actually 550v) DC. They do not specify how much current each traction motor carriage draws, and after searching through the literal hundreds of pics I took on the trip (including a few dozen on the train itself) I didn't get any pics of that breaker in the car that tripped. I do recall it was about 14x10x8 inches in size, and I did look at the data plate and 300 amps seems to be the number I recalled on that particular breaker. IIRC, the Manx Railway will only run one or two trams with traction motors at a time on the entire railway, so the current draw wouldn't be as high as more modern high speed railways. There is an excellent video somewhere buried in my thousand or so YT bookmarks that shows one of the substations, including the old mercury arc rectifiers! I think they mentioned in that video how much current each trolley uses. I can't locate it at the moment though.
The invisible man was once a specialist in the Army, We have been referred to as Shamurai's, no worries though we're like cats when sleeping, We always land on our feet...probably...lol
It’s funny. I never thought about that until the old director mentioned it. Then it happened about a year later and that when I remembered and said, let’s try and put it away.
Love the Ghost train and floor stories the most so far (about halfway through the video as I type this). (Edit: I saw that Modern Marvels episode!!) I have another story from the same park with the dolphins...during our annual holiday times I had to rig lights and sound effects in various rides. The first time I went into our log flume ride I went with my shift super and another tech. I thought that the way to get to the individual scenes was through the interior access halls and stairs. My super said nope, it's a lot faster and easier to get to most of the scenes by walking in the flume itself. As Ryan knows and some of you know, those flumes are usually made of fiberglass and have a lot of "give" in them. Kinda like walking on a firm mattress. Well we start with scene 1, then move to scene 2, where the flume is at floor level or a few feet above. We get into scene 3 where suddenly there was a LOT of echo, and it was noticeably colder. The flume also felt even softer. I was like WTF is goin on in here? As I climbed out of the flume to set some lights I looked down......to a 30 FOOT drop into a pool of water. I asked the super what is that? He said it's the main reservoir for the ride. "How deep is it?" About 35 feet. Yikes. (I hate heights and absolutely refused to go to the top of the sky tower at all.) I was terrified and could barely finish my task. (And there was no other way out of that scene.) The worst part? Taking a closer look...if you fell in, there was no visible way out (stairs, catwalk, etc.) and only random steel support posts to hold on to. It would be a VERY long time trying to stay afloat before you could get pulled out of there. (The quick way out would be for them to start the pumps and grind you into fish bait.) Add another ride to the list that I avoided for the rest of my time there.
@@ryantheridemechanic Yeah it had me shaken up pretty bad..I am also a lousy swimmer. :) Your wheel carrier story brought another one from my days to mind: (Edited to fix run time on the 3D short) We had a short 3D film show (about 20 minutes) on 35mm film playing at the park. (I got hired on as a tech because of my expertise in 35 and 70mm film equipment). We had originally run the film off of a platter transport, with 8 copies of the film that the automation would stop at the end of each one. We'd restart them from an upstairs control booth after the usher gave the opening spiel. At the end of the day I would clean the projector that ran them, then rethread on the second projector present for the next day's shows. We alternated the two machines to even out the wear. I ran most of the shows but on my days off we had one tech trained on running, cleaning and rethreads. After some time there I installed an "endless loop" platter that eliminated the need to rethread the film. (We were also able to load only 4 copies at a time, saving the risk of damaging all of them in case of mistreading.) Once that was done we trained two more techs to run on some days so I could be free to do other tech work. I would take care of the nightly cleaning as it took some special steps to unthread the machine without losing the tension on the platter's tricky feed system. (See my channel's playlist on film equipment or search "endless loop platter" to see how one works.) Well, on one of my evenings off from that facility I get a radio call from the tech who was running the shows that day. (The one previously trained with the old setup.) I asked what was up and he told me to call the landline. Uh, oh. First words out of his mouth was "I f'd up...but the film's ok." I got over there to find out that he tried to be helpful and wanted to clean the projector after the shows. Well he forgot to turn the power off to the platter and as soon as he released tension on the film it went high speed and sucked the loop of film in, messing up the tension on the rest of the film pack. It took me the remaining 3 hours of my shift to undo the carnage and reset everything for the next day. After that he was scared to even look at that platter. 😬
@@mxslick50 ugh. We had a tech who had a passion for that film in an endless loop cabinet. But he was a good animator. Really knew how to drew well with a sharpie. He drew a picture perfect diagram of a tech standing in front of the cabinet with the entire Film at his feet do to a stuck roller. What a mess it was. I remember cleaning the projector heads at night but I never got the hang of threading them well. I came close.
@@ryantheridemechanic Yeah cabinets are the worst. A simple film break resulted in hundreds/thousands of feet of tangled mess. The endless loop (or regular) platter was ok IF the film didn't fall off of the deck..if it did trying to pick it up made it 10k times worse. What the tech did was suck the pack in tight and I had to manually back it off, then by hand feed it back in at the right tension. Fun times!
@@ryantheridemechanic I would not be surprised if you worked at the same park I used to...my reply to you in my other comment about the flume ride will give away where I was at. 😁
Having to literally put your ghost train into storage is amusing
My favourite story so far
Yea interesting.
Is there also a ghost train storage track?😂
@@Jenlovescoasters no but you can valley a ghost train haha
@@ryantheridemechanic I have totally vallied a ghost train.🤣
Perfect Timing. My Dinner is just ready. So a Mechanic Story Dinner it is. Amazing.😄
Bon appétit !
Could listen all day to these stories.
When i did ironwork we would nap on the catwalk about 200 feet up in the air at a mill we were working at. We'd tie off to keep from rolling off if we rolled over though. 😂 This one dude would even make a hammock out of an extra harness and a couple cheaters and just hang under the cat walk. He was a laid off rescue climber. The human will to sleep is strong.
Wow! That’s strong for sure.
@@ryantheridemechanic Working 7*12s does strange things to a man.
I'm not even a ride tech or anything, just a ride enthusiast, but i enjoy these videos! Also youtube tip: either in the description or a pinned comment, leave links to parts 1 & 2 :) Might get more people to watch them after this ;)
Thanks !
Where to begin? 🤣🤣🤣🤣 That sums it up. I used to love watching the uncomfortable looks on higher ups faces when inspectors or people they wanted to impress started talking with me. 😂 We got along great them not so much.
Oh, we have a vanishing employee too.. we call him Magic Mike
Um……
But,… you,;::…..
Okay. Maybe a new name.
Two for you, from the world of tourist trains ...
1. Come around a curve, standing in an open air car (as conductor), there's an absolutely thunderously loud BANG!
People look at me, I look at them, and casually as I can key my radio to the engineer : "Edmund, what was that?"
"That's what I'd like to know" .......... yeah, just what you want to hear from your engineer surrounded by passengers.
We stop, and about halfway down the train there's this giant boulder. like 2'x3'x3'. Massive. Luckily for us, the GP9 leading the train came from up north and had a snowplow blade. That rock didn't even scratch the paint. Figuring half the train had already gotten past the diverted chunk of granite, we crawled the rest of the train past it, and it officially became Someone Else's Problem (tm) to deal with.
2. Sitting at the station, we get a call from 911. It's never a good thing when 911 calls YOU, vs you calling THEM.
Truck has can opener-ed itself (like a sardine can) on the underside of the bridge over the river.
911 wants to know what we're gonna do. "Uhhhhh, we're not doing anything until someone inspects that bridge"
Wow fun stuff!
I was at the Isle of Man in 2022 for the big race, and wanted to ride the Manx Electric Railway to Ramsey. I was sitting in the back car, fairly close to the back where the conductor and controls were. As we got about halfway up the first hill, there was an incredibly loud bang and massive blue flash from the rear by where the conductor was sitting. We come to a dead stop and the conductor calmly calls down the the station on the radio to send a mechanic up.
Come to find out one of the traction motors flashed over and the DC breaker (circa 1905ish) by the conductor's station had tripped. Some inspection and a breaker reset later , we were on our way again. I asked the conductor how often that happened, and why he didn't jump when it did. He calmly (and in typical UK aplomb) said "It happens about twice a week, and I'm used to it." It was a fun ride and on the return trip nothing bad happened. :)
@@mxslick50 most electric railways (unless you're Amtrak) run on either 600 or 750v DC. At absolutely prodigious levels of current consumed. eg, entire substations worth.
You trip a breaker on that, it's like a literal lightning bolt induced thunderclap.
@@litz13 According to the Manx Electric Railway Society, the Manx Railway runs on 500v (actually 550v) DC. They do not specify how much current each traction motor carriage draws, and after searching through the literal hundreds of pics I took on the trip (including a few dozen on the train itself) I didn't get any pics of that breaker in the car that tripped. I do recall it was about 14x10x8 inches in size, and I did look at the data plate and 300 amps seems to be the number I recalled on that particular breaker.
IIRC, the Manx Railway will only run one or two trams with traction motors at a time on the entire railway, so the current draw wouldn't be as high as more modern high speed railways.
There is an excellent video somewhere buried in my thousand or so YT bookmarks that shows one of the substations, including the old mercury arc rectifiers! I think they mentioned in that video how much current each trolley uses. I can't locate it at the moment though.
@@mxslick50 heh, 500 or 550 is still plenty enough at train levels of current. It'll pop just as much.
Love putting your videos on while I fall asleep i magically become smarter overnight! Keep up the great work!
Thanks!
Very interesting story time! Thanks for getting us laughing this Friday! The day was a long and tiring one for me today. Needed the laughs 😂
That’s good!
The invisible man was once a specialist in the Army, We have been referred to as Shamurai's, no worries though we're like cats when sleeping, We always land on our feet...probably...lol
W thumbnail lmao
I don’t know if it’s foreshadowing or clickbait.
@@ryantheridemechanic demonetized!
Love these episodes please do more 🙏
My favorite story was transferring the ghost train and parking it in the shop.
It’s funny. I never thought about that until the old director mentioned it. Then it happened about a year later and that when I remembered and said, let’s try and put it away.
Thanks!
Thanks!! Wow that’s awesome!
I think fix it again tony "fiat" might be a close translation for what your looking for
Love the Ghost train and floor stories the most so far (about halfway through the video as I type this). (Edit: I saw that Modern Marvels episode!!)
I have another story from the same park with the dolphins...during our annual holiday times I had to rig lights and sound effects in various rides. The first time I went into our log flume ride I went with my shift super and another tech. I thought that the way to get to the individual scenes was through the interior access halls and stairs. My super said nope, it's a lot faster and easier to get to most of the scenes by walking in the flume itself.
As Ryan knows and some of you know, those flumes are usually made of fiberglass and have a lot of "give" in them. Kinda like walking on a firm mattress. Well we start with scene 1, then move to scene 2, where the flume is at floor level or a few feet above. We get into scene 3 where suddenly there was a LOT of echo, and it was noticeably colder. The flume also felt even softer. I was like WTF is goin on in here? As I climbed out of the flume to set some lights I looked down......to a 30 FOOT drop into a pool of water. I asked the super what is that? He said it's the main reservoir for the ride. "How deep is it?" About 35 feet. Yikes. (I hate heights and absolutely refused to go to the top of the sky tower at all.) I was terrified and could barely finish my task. (And there was no other way out of that scene.)
The worst part? Taking a closer look...if you fell in, there was no visible way out (stairs, catwalk, etc.) and only random steel support posts to hold on to. It would be a VERY long time trying to stay afloat before you could get pulled out of there. (The quick way out would be for them to start the pumps and grind you into fish bait.)
Add another ride to the list that I avoided for the rest of my time there.
That sounds like a watery nightmare! Yuck!
@@ryantheridemechanic Yeah it had me shaken up pretty bad..I am also a lousy swimmer. :)
Your wheel carrier story brought another one from my days to mind: (Edited to fix run time on the 3D short)
We had a short 3D film show (about 20 minutes) on 35mm film playing at the park. (I got hired on as a tech because of my expertise in 35 and 70mm film equipment). We had originally run the film off of a platter transport, with 8 copies of the film that the automation would stop at the end of each one. We'd restart them from an upstairs control booth after the usher gave the opening spiel. At the end of the day I would clean the projector that ran them, then rethread on the second projector present for the next day's shows. We alternated the two machines to even out the wear. I ran most of the shows but on my days off we had one tech trained on running, cleaning and rethreads.
After some time there I installed an "endless loop" platter that eliminated the need to rethread the film. (We were also able to load only 4 copies at a time, saving the risk of damaging all of them in case of mistreading.) Once that was done we trained two more techs to run on some days so I could be free to do other tech work. I would take care of the nightly cleaning as it took some special steps to unthread the machine without losing the tension on the platter's tricky feed system. (See my channel's playlist on film equipment or search "endless loop platter" to see how one works.)
Well, on one of my evenings off from that facility I get a radio call from the tech who was running the shows that day. (The one previously trained with the old setup.) I asked what was up and he told me to call the landline. Uh, oh. First words out of his mouth was "I f'd up...but the film's ok." I got over there to find out that he tried to be helpful and wanted to clean the projector after the shows. Well he forgot to turn the power off to the platter and as soon as he released tension on the film it went high speed and sucked the loop of film in, messing up the tension on the rest of the film pack.
It took me the remaining 3 hours of my shift to undo the carnage and reset everything for the next day. After that he was scared to even look at that platter. 😬
@@mxslick50 ugh. We had a tech who had a passion for that film in an endless loop cabinet. But he was a good animator. Really knew how to drew well with a sharpie. He drew a picture perfect diagram of a tech standing in front of the cabinet with the entire Film at his feet do to a stuck roller. What a mess it was. I remember cleaning the projector heads at night but I never got the hang of threading them well. I came close.
@@ryantheridemechanic Yeah cabinets are the worst. A simple film break resulted in hundreds/thousands of feet of tangled mess. The endless loop (or regular) platter was ok IF the film didn't fall off of the deck..if it did trying to pick it up made it 10k times worse. What the tech did was suck the pack in tight and I had to manually back it off, then by hand feed it back in at the right tension. Fun times!
Is there a part 2 or did i miss it?
There is a 2
th-cam.com/video/VrkoWvu49tM/w-d-xo.htmlsi=aXKawZBK6awKBNJS
Thank you
Do you work at six flags magic mountain?
No. Thanks for playing though.
@@ryantheridemechanic I would not be surprised if you worked at the same park I used to...my reply to you in my other comment about the flume ride will give away where I was at. 😁
Sfdk
Six Flags Discovery Kingdom!
I know you won’t say what park you work at but you look like you live in California
Six Flags Discovery Kingdom!
@@pinball541 ohh
Do you still work at the park?
No I’ve been gone for 6 years now. It’s one of the reasons I can have this channel.
STORIES, not story’s.
Ha! True haha!
he changed it
Why do you always wear that Batman shirt
Love that shirt. Comfortable. Plus I change it from time to time. More of my own stuff now that I have my own merch. I’m ordering more of it
@@ryantheridemechanic ryan the ride mechanic's biggest fan, ryan the ride mechanic
@@knowitallandy ya got to toot your own horn, no one else will do it for you.
@@ryantheridemechanic amen brother love your channel keep it up