Over the past couple of months, construction has quietly been taking place at the Tomorrowland Speedway in an attempt to prevent cars from jumping the track on turn one. As you’ll see in the photos below, a strip of concrete has been installed along turn one, similar to other sections of the attraction, that will make it less likely that cars will jump the track. The work began a couple of months ago and was completed recently. Here’s a look!
Tomorrowland Speedway Track Improvements
In this first photo, we’re looking at the Tomorrowland Speedway from the walkway to TRON Lightcycle Run. On the right side of the image, you can see the track narrowing to a single-wide rail, with the concrete “double-wide” rail turning back toward the start of the attraction.
As you can see in our photos below, the bottom of the Tomorrowland Speedway vehicles have guides on them that keep the vehicle in the correct lane throughout the ride. Sometimes, when a vehicle hits the guide rail at just the right angle and speed, there is a possibility that the vehicle can jump over the rail and get stuck. This possibility is increased wherever the rail is “single-wide”. The possibility is also increased in the turns, which is where we often see the “double-wide” rail with concrete median in use.
Fewer derailed cars means better operations and less attraction downtime or reduced capacity. Overall, it’s a win! Of course, the true win will be whenever Walt Disney World decides to make the vehicles electric, but I think we’ll be waiting a bit for that.
As always, keep checking back with us here at BlogMickey.com as we continue to bring you the latest news, photos, and info from around the Disney Parks!
The execution of this seems sloppy. The bent metal as seen in the final photo is not a nice, continuous curve (as would be generated by sending CAD files to a metal bending shop), rather it looks herky-jerky, like it was roughly hand-bent on site. A close up photo shows the concrete fill between the metal looking sloppy. Is this a temporary fix?…it does not look up to Disney Park standards.