simononestop wrote:lewis97 wrote:They're for 'extra' supports. If you look on the following plan you can see that most of the turns are supported in a similar way in order to give the required strength and stability.
hmmm if the supports are on the inside of the first turn then that means it banks to the left around the turn.
which says to me that the cart is traveling slow as the weight is being supported in the middle of the turn.
if it was a launched lift hill and the cart went round the first corner quickly the weight would shift and push more to the outside on the corner. the supports would have to go out further round the outside of the corner?
so no launched lift hill
Whilst I agree with you that the train will be travelling around that top corner slowly, what you say isn't quite correct. Supports can still be positioned on the inside of the track corner, but instead of providing resistance through compression, they rely on working in tension. This does rely on good fixings down into the concrete foundation to prevent it from toppling over though.
Theoretically the train would have to travel around the top corner relatively slowly, purely due to the radius of the turn. It's far too compact of radius to warrant any high speeds.
However, it does not completely rule out a launched lift hill, as the launch could be primarily at the bottom and coast up the hill until it has reached an acceptable speed to go around the bend. Lightning rod kind of does this (albeit not quite to this extreme) as the launch mechanism does not go all the way to the top. Using this approach might be troublesome though, as it would need to calculate the required force to reach the top at the correct speed, based on the weight of each train.
