How that even happens in this day and age I don't understand.
I do know what you mean, but this did make me wonder - give how many cumulative thousands of miles coaster trains must travel in a given time period, maybe it's actually kind of staggering it doesn't happen more often if you came at it from a statistical perspective.
Looking at Bat in isolation - and pulling stats off RCDB:
- Opened 1993
- 2350ft length
- 1200 riders/hour
- 28 riders/train
- 2 trains
The from the pictures above, each wheel assembly has 5 wheels (2 running, 2 side, 1 upstop) and there are 16 wheel assemblies on each train. And from the park website, hours are 10am-10pm and let's make a rough estimate that the ride/park is open every day during June, July and August.
That means, crudely speaking:
- 21 trains per hour
- Each train completes 250 circuits per day
- Each train completes 23,000 circuits per season
- Each train has completed 644,000 circuits in it's lifetime
- That means the total distance covered by each train in it's lifetime is ~286,000 miles
- The total wheel rolling distance in it's lifetime is ~22.8million miles
And there's only been one wheel failure? Doesn't seem actually that bad, statistically speaking.
Add the total wheel rolling distance for every major coaster in the world and this sort of thing starts to become staggeringly rare. Enough to just chalk it up to "accidents happen", no?