Origin Story
Description
How it Could Have Been Better
Specs
The Three Overwhelmingly Cool Aspects of the Party
Videos of the Night of the Event
Image Gallery 1 of the Night of the Event
Image Gallery 2 of the Night of the Event
Image Gallery 3 of the Night of the Event
Video Gallery of the Construction of the Event
Image Gallery of Construction of the Event
Video Gallery of the Process of Mine Ride Construction
Video Gallery of the Media of the Event

Origin Story:

The circumstances of this party starting were quite a surprise. It wasn’t my idea, it was Lily’s, and how it came about is quite different. It was the day after the Mardi Gras Party. I had just finished cleaning up outside (had not torn down the facade or anything) and was lying face down on the couch exhausted, which always happens, and she came up to me and said “Hey, I want to talk to you about something.” She told me she wanted to do something for my birthday in 2018, which would be my 50th birthday. She wanted to surprise me by taking me somewhere, but she thought that maybe I’d rather make a party. Now I can’t tell if suggesting another party while I’m face down exhausted from the night before’s party is a good idea or not, but she said she would pay for the party. I asked her what theme she wanted (because it’s important that my wife like the theme in order to put up with it) and we had been watching “Hell on Wheels” the historical fiction about the transcontinental railroad being built, and she suggested we throw a western party with a train in it. (My mind immediately went to the new Westworld series where the train departs the futuristic city into the Arizona/Utah deserts…but I digress). I thought about this quite a while, and although I wasn’t opposed to building a 1:1 scale train on our property I didn’t feel it was going to work if the train didn’t go anywhere. I thought about making a smaller train that could go around our house. My mind went to the Calico Mine Train at Knott’s Berry Farm that I dearly love. So I pitched the idea of changing the theme from the transcontinental railroad to a Gold Rush era gold mine ride. She consented. I told her “Building a ride is going to cost a lot, especially to do it properly (like at a theme park) and safely. So I offered to match her financial contribution to be able to built the ride (I haven’t built a ride in years). She accepted this and we were off to the races. It ended up being pretty expensive – we could have taken a grip to Europe, but then again, anybody can do that. Most people won’t ever get to have an experience doing something grand like this even if they wanted to. I was going to build a full working gold mine train dark ride around my house! We did have almost $2000 in donations from guests, so that’s a lot of help!

As much work as this was going to be, we knew we didn’t want to go to a years worth of work for one night. So we agreed to actually throw two parties, the main “immersive wild west” one in April, and then in October we’d have a Haunted Mine Ride and throw a costume Halloween party that was reduced significantly in scope, but the ride still worked and the set was the same (mostly), and we would theme the ride “haunted”.

Description:

Before I start discussing this, I want to explain a fact that most people probably haven’t thought about. It’s hard to wrap your head around certain things. An example is that all the planets fit between the Moon and the Earth. Basically the diameters of all the planets put together is less than ~ 239,000 miles. Anyway, that’s pertinent here is – a say 19 year old man could be swashbuckling as a pirate in the Caribbean, and sail to Virginia, take a train to the West coast, the wild west, and literally be in their mid 50s at the time of the Gold Rush (1849). That’s pretty wild if you ask me.

I wrote a backstory for this party, which is that of the badass woman “Lil”. Yes that’s practically the name of my wife. Why Lil? Because as a crew, we went to the Calico Mine together a few months before the party and went through the mines and had a fun day together gathering ideas and just hanging out and the bar there is “Lil’s Saloon” . So I made our saloon here Lil’s Saloon and Lily played Lil. The backstory I wrote is that Lil is a very young woman who fell in love and married a man in the wild west around the time of the Gold Rush who was a prospector, womanizer, and often a drunk. After finding out he was cheating on her, she follows him into his mine to find that he had actually found a lot of gold and had stashed it in the mine and told her he wasn’t finding any, but here he was with some other girl and he had bags of gold and was preparing to leave Lil and leave town with the money and the girl. Lil becomes enraged and kills both of them in the mine, takes the gold herself, and blows up the mine so no-one suspects her.
This story is not fully conveyed to the guests, which was the intent, but they catch glimpses of it, such as in the video vignette (Lily and I acted in) of her husband coming home drunk and she yells at him and ultimately hits him over the head with a frying pan.

The big thing with this event is that we didn’t tell guests we built a mine ride. We invited them and when they RSVPd yes, we sent them a “package” as is common for us, which includes info on what to do and not do and what to wear and what to expect, and we told them all these cool things but didn’t mention the ride. Inside the package was train “tickets” made out of old paper in a telegram form and font. It says to be at my house for the party and lists a very specific time, such as 5:25, and DON’T BE LATE. This is because the throughput of the ride is only so many people per minute with 3 ride vehicles, so we tried to stagger people going into the party instead of having a huge line. We knew we would probably anyway, but this would help. So guests arrived and they started out by getting on this mine train, and it takes off with them alone in the cart and goes into a mine tunnel with a door that opened automatically. Inside the “mine” we had built rockwork and a tunnel up with a ladder and sound fx and at the end of the tunnel was the exit doors, but on the exit doors we used a short-throw projector at maximum angle to project video of the mine shaft continuing (we actually shot footage of our actual mine and used that) and we added rocks falling, timber falling, and the mine collapsing right before the doors opened and you exited into Longwood, the quaint mining town that was my backyard. You then went under the stage and then stopped at the rear train station and got off. If you wanted to leave the party, you got on the train in one of the three mine vehicles at the rear train station and it continued around the house into a different kind of mine (an abandoned mine) that was not lit at all, completely in the dark, and there is a dynamite explosion (Lil blowing up the mine), then right when that happened the ride vehicle would drop down several feet like a roller coaster and race to the front of the house where doors would open and you would turn and go to the right and to the front train station to get off. To do this “drop” we used the fact that houses have grading (dirt landscaping around the house) such that water flows to the front of the house, so it’s downhill. We used this such that the ride when you start out in the first mine you’re going uphill slowly and you’re looking at things and it’s flat in the back. When you leave the rear train station you’re going uphill slightly again as you go towards the front. The ground is going downhill, but you’re going uphill, then when the drop is high enough, we changed how the track is shaped and you drop down a ramp and stay along the ground. This was not trivial to do I might add considering the vehicle is pulling you along the track until you’re falling and then it isn’t anymore and then it has to pull you again for the remainder of the ride.

At this point you get the drift of the party enough for me to just list things that we had at the party. How the ride worked I will go into more detail in one section below:

• After guests accepted the invite by email, we sent them a package that contained a telegram made on old paper and using a telegram font and style of writing that asked them to arrive at a preset time (different for each set of guests) so that the ride queue would not back up too much.
• Guests did not know we had a mine train ride. The telegram said to arrive at a certain time for your train departure, but said nothing more, so people likely did not think the “train” part was real
• When guests arrived, their invite was confirmed, and then they were allowed to cue up for the train ride at the front station.
• The front of our house was blocked off so there appeared to be no front door, although there was a hidden door, and a guest that for some reason could not/would not use the train could be escorted to the back of the house without riding the train
• The front yard consisted of the front train station, boot hill which contained graves built similarly in appearance to the real Boot Hill in Arizona, a hanging noose, a small “jail” building for a photo op, and the entrance and egress train ride Adits (mine openings)

The Mine Ride construction

• Each train station would accommodate two mine ride vehicles, one in the front and one in the back. Guests would get on the vehicle in the front, we would shut the door to the vehicle, and then push a button on the console to send them on their way to Zone 1
• When the front vehicle in the train station would leave the station, if there was a vehicle in the back, it would automatically move to the front position.
• There were 3 mine ride vehicles. Each ran independently of the other and would stop either at the train station in the front or rear position, or if the station was full, would stop one zone outside the station and wait (cascade). This is how a real theme park dark ride operates.
• The ride track consisted of nine zones, plus two mini zones for each train station. Each zone was powered separately from each other and was not electrically connected. Each zone could power on at a certain voltage which translated to a certain speed of motion or could turn off. This was controlled by the main ride controller (RSS)
• Each zone had sensors on it, that detected a ride vehicle on it, which would send signals back to the main ride controller to let it know which zones had vehicles in them. If a vehicle was in the zone in front of a zone a vehicle was in, the behind vehicle needed to stop so as not to enter the forward zone, and so the RSS would drop power to the behind zone, until the zone in front of it was clear.
• Because each zone isn’t electrically connected, each vehicle relied on momentum to take the vehicle to the next zone. When the vehicle power “brushes” leave one zone and go into another, the brushes will electrically connect both zones together. Even if they are at different voltages this is not a problem, especially for the short amount of time that a vehicle’s brushes are touching both zones track.
• The track is powered from many 24V power supplies, between 20A and 40A depending on whether or not the zone was making the vehicles go uphill. The motor driver circuits were connected to the zone, not to the vehicle
• The track was made from 2′ wide plywood for straight track, and 4’x4′ plywood for most curves. Some curves were custom.
• In the middle of the track was a track rail, that had 24V +/- on each side of the wooden center rail. This track rail was a 2×6 piece of lumber on edge, bracketed to the plywood
• For curved track rail, we custom made curved 2x6s with laminated plywood. This was non-trivial and took many days to get right.
• The entire ride system worked with a real E-Stop, that would halt the vehicles if a sensor detected a bad condition or if someone walked on the tracks they would be seen by the ride supervisor, who would push the E-Stop button
• The ride system was controlled by a PLC using ladder logic, which is also how a real theme park ride system would work.
• The ride was monitored by 16 infrared cameras that were constantly being monitored by the ride supervisor
• The ride vehicle had two power wheelchair motors and two brushes to rub on the track rail band of metal. No other intelligence was needed on the part of the vehicle for proper operation
• The track had metal blocks on top of the track rail that the ride vehicle would drive over and sense with a magnet, telling the vehicle it was hitting an “audio spot”
• Each vehicle had an on-board audio system that would playback audio to an amplifier and speaker for the guest to hear. This was primarily narration for the mine ride including safety spiels “Keep your hands inside the vehicle at all times” plus creative audio at each scene
• Each vehicle had a completely custom on-board infrared-based targeting system built into toy western guns so the riding guests could play our shooting gallery. The gun was cabled/ tethered to the vehicle and the guests could not take it with them.
• The shooting gallery system and on-board infrared gun were programmed to be off and not work before 6 pm. This is so guests arriving would focus on the train ride and also not be tempted to continue the ride past the rear train station, making it harder to seat new guests entering, which was already a concern. Guests leaving would leave sporadically enough not to be a concern for available ride vehicles.
• Each vehicle’s infrared targeting system gun worked on a slightly different frequency so that the targets would know which gun shot it. This was supposed to be used to keep score for each rider, but did not end up being implemented
• Each vehicles’ on-board audio system would also play a gun firing sound when the gun trigger was pulled, and this would appropriately layer on top of the sound of narration, if any was playing.
• Each vehicle had an on-board battery that supplied power to both the on-board audio system and the infrared shooting gallery gun system
• Targets for the shooting gallery were placed around the track in various strategic places and had a ring of light that would show the guest where to point
• When a target was hit by a guest firing, in many cases a physical effect would happen such as a shovel swaying, a lantern going off for a short amount of time, or in the case of video windows on building, would change briefly to a target being shot. The ring of light on the target would also flash different colors when it had been struck
• The first ride scene after the front train station was Boot Hill, where there are many graves with funny gravestones, then the track turns to be on the left side of the house, you arrive in front of the main mine adit (entrance) and the doors open automagically. Once inside the mine you see the mine walls and timbers holding up the mine, various lit lanterns, a vertical shaft with a ladder going up it, hear miners working in the shaft and feel a breeze coming from the shaft, then you see on the egress doors of the mine tunnel that the tunnel your’e in is collapsing with rock and timber falling but then the doors automagically open and you are safe in the town of Longwood!
• The backyard is filled with tables and seats and walking area. The track track goes around the perimeter of the yard. There are facade buildings all around the yard.
• The train first goes by the Post Office to the left, which is our control room. It contains the main ride supervisor control system, the camera station for the ride supervisor to watch the vehicles go by, even in the dark and make sure everyone is safe, doesn’t try to get out, stick their hands out, or gets stuck somehow not of their doing.
• The ride supervisor can press the E-Stop button to stop the ride. The ride supervisor can also speak into a microphone and talk to guests on the ride, such as “please keep your hands inside the vehicle”
• The Post Office also contains an audio console, for the ride supervisor to mix the live band and switch to canned music when the live band is not playing.
• The track continues and makes a right and goes under the stage. The stage sticks out from atop our back wall around 5 feet and is supported by 3 4x4s mounted in the style of a mine shaft timber. The 3 propane lanterns from New Orleans are mounted on each 4×4 column. While the lanterns don’t fit the era 100% they are close enough, and look cool while lit, especially at night
• The train track continues to the rear train station. Guests when they first arrive to the party would get off here and not continue.
• An hour after the party started the Shooting Gallery system would start working. Guests could get on at either station and shoot at targets for fun. Guests did ride it and play the game. Two guys (ahem Lance and Sami) spent a great deal of time riding the trains shooting at the targets during the event. This made me feel like guests really liked it.
• When you leave the rear train station you are immediately presented with a switch in the track and two sets of mine adits (mine entrances). Of course every time the guest would not go in the correct doors but accidentally go through the abandoned mine entrance and travel in complete darkness.
• Inside the abandoned mine side there would be nothing to see but you would be see a dynamite fuse being “lit” and would travel for a few feet to “dynamite” which would explode loudly and you would be hit by a smoke cannon. Right about then the vehicle would go down the drop. While only being about 3 ft. it would come as a complete surprise to a guest who hadn’t ridden it before. The drop is fast as well.
• After the drop the track goes through a final set of doors going outside again, and the track turns to the right and guests would stop at the front train station.
• Getting off the ride was never mandatory, except the guests first ride of the night, arriving at the rear train station

Everything Else Beside the Ride and Shooting Gallery

• If you were standing looking at the main mine egress doors which guests would come out of, to the left of those doors would be the Assay Office. Inside the window of the Assay office you would see a counter with gold bars, a nugget weighing scale, and a small real gold nugget about the size of a pencil eraser. For some reason I felt having a real gold nugget was a good idea. I still have it.
• To the left of the Assay Office was Lil’s Saloon, which is where the doors to our house were. This is the only facaded building that you could enter. I made it so our sliding glass doors could be removed the days of the party, and instead were double swinging saloon doors. Inside the saloon were tables and chairs that were period like, an organ, and a bar where the bartender served drinks. Above Lil’s Saloon on the facade outside were two second story “window” video screens.
• To the left of Lil’s Saloon was the Trading Post. Here you could open the doors and there were shelves. We told guests they could bring something and exchange it (trade) with whatever they found on the shelves from what others brought or we left. I wanted to stock it with beaver pelts… ok not really. We stocked it with fun things – I put in a teapot from the Alice in Wonderland Unbirthday Party, a stack of my published books based on the Zombie Party. Sean put in some faux dynamite that was left over as props for the abandoned mine tunnel. The funny thing is, while the dynamite is a paper roll filled with sand and painted red, the fuse was real – some version of PRIMACORD and we found that someone had lit one as a joke and it burned down to the paper LOL – that must have scared them! Melissa crocheted several hats and costume beards that were very cute and she put those in there and people were trading for them. I really like adding things like this to a party. It costs very little, and it’s a bit silly, but it’s still fun to see what’s available to trade with whatever you brought. The doors of the Trading Post were the front porch entrance doors from the Mardi Gras Party.
• To the left of the Trading Post was the Telegraph Office. This facade didn’t have much except for one small shelf with a telegraph device on it. I built a pair of such devices, the other being on a desk inside the saloon (inside the house). When no-one was touching the telegraphs, they would tap away SOS every once in a while by themselves (attract mode) and if someone started touching them they would tap to the other side and guests could see how easy it was. We left a plastic coated card at each telegraph with a few morse code words (mostly 3 letter) that they could try to communicate to their friend at the other end.
• To the left of the Telegraph Office was the Rear Train Station. You couldn’t walk past it. The train stations each used one of the two pieces of rod iron fencing I had obtained for the Mardi Gras Party.
• On the hill from left to right was a jail, with a “window” video screen, the band stage, and then several forced perspective smaller facades of a hotel and livery. These reminded me of the “Rainbow Ridge” section of the original 1955 train ride Mine Train Through Nature’s Wonderland Ride at Disneyland.

How it could have been better:

There were several issues with this party.

The first is that somehow, despite having carefully checked, there was one connection of the ride track on the right side in Boot Hill (the first scene on the ride after you leave the front station) that didn’t have screws mechanically hold the pieces of steel banding together. This caused the ride vehicle to just stop in the middle of Boot Hill every so often. It was so perplexing. We kept thinking it was related to the power needs of the ride. Because I intentionally connected power to both “ends” of a track section, there would be very little drop in voltage along any given track zone, but here the vehicle somehow couldn’t get power from either “side” of the disconnected metal band and would stop and we would have to push the vehicle until it got past this. Essentially guests got “stuck”, but only one out of five or something. It was terrible! I found and fixed this for the haunted mine ride for the Halloween version of the party, and no guest got stuck here again.

For the window vignette videos, I used Raspberry Pi Zeros, since they just mostly just looped. Zeros are cheaper versions of the full Raspberry Pi computer. They have mini HDMI connectors. Well not only are they mini connectors but they aren’t connected as well. Apparently from connecting and disconnecting them so many times, the internal wiring would be intermittent, so these videos would just “go out” during the party. I kept thinking it was the RP OS (basically Linux) that I had installed wrong somehow, but it turns out it was the connectors. I replaced these for the Halloween version of the party.

I attached the 3 propane lanterns that I used for the Mardi Gras party on the outside of the Stage, but I changed how I regulated the propane, and too much propane was pushing its way past the little valve in the lantern and would make the flame be really high … or go out. I tried to fix this mid party, but I foolishly expected this to just work, and if you change the physics, you can’t expect it to work the same way. I fixed this for the Halloween version of the party.

The mine ride shooting gallery aspect was supposed to have the circuits signal the IMS when a guest got points. Tje infrared gun in each ride vehicle used a specific frequency that was different from the other ones, so the target would know which of the three guns hit it. I was going to make a score board with the IMS so guests could competitively keep track of their score, but it took so long to install each trigger with the effect the trigger caused that we ran out of time to implement this.

Building the mining facade to completely hide my house on the side of the house took a lot more time than I expected to do correctly, and so when we made the facading of other building on the hill next to the stage, with the time we had, I opted for a forced-perspective 2/3 size building with about a third of the detail/decoration because it’s so much farther away from the guests. This turned out “ok” but could have been better.

I had made a set of tri-tip sandwiches, pulled pork sandwiches, and sous cheffed the onion ring pieces ahead of time, so that the catering company could see what I had made. I instructed them on how to do the sandwiches and onion rings. I know how we want the food. Lily is in charge of the food but still I made these items for them to follow the instructions I gave them. They did not butter and grill the bread before putting the meat on them, so instead of getting warm buns that were sort of like garlic bread, they were cold bland buns. This is so incredibly unacceptable. The onion rings can be dumped in the fryer with the batter haphazardly on them. I make them like this all the time and they’re great, but instead of doing that, the onion rings were done a few at a time and so two bags of eight bags of onion rings got served to guests, and they were wanting of them and I didn’t know.

While getting dressed in my costume for the party, I was just getting out of the shower while guests scheduled to arrive the earliest were already there, I hadn’t slept much in days and was in a hurry and putting my pants on I stepped on my belt buckle on the floor with all my weight and the tang of the buckle went through the bottom of my foot. There wasn’t time for me to do anything about it, so I just put my sock on and my boots on and sloshed around the night with my foot half-soaked in blood and limped. This wouldn’t have been so bad except because it was my birthday, the band leader, who had no idea what happened, asked for me to come play drums for a song over the microphone. I resisted but ended up getting up on stage anyway and playing a song, and let me tell you, my foot did not cooperate in playing drums.

Given how much infrastructure we built for this party and only doing it one night, the 105 people that we invited that came was a bit too many and some felt it was “crowded”. In our Prohibition Party we opted for two nights in a row and a max of 75 people per night. This was much better!

Specs:

Date: April 28, 2018
Level Party: “A”
Food: BBQ tri-tip sandwiches with my apple-horseradish sour-cream sauce, BBQ pulled chicken sandwiches with my almond scallion coleslaw, thin spicy onion rings,
Canned Music: When the band wasn’t playing we played light/folk rock (I can’t stand country music)
Live Entertainment: The Happiness Band configured as a folk rock band, and before the band came on, two players that walked around playing guitar etc. We also hired a really well-known card trick magician to entertain guests.
Staff: Lily, Kevin, Brenna, Perry, John, Brian, Darylyn, Sean, Melissa, Todd, Alec, Ryan, Alex, Mark, Aaron, Meredith, Dan, Neal, Renee, Benj, Dave, Paul
Staff hired: Security, Train Operator, Catering company, Bartender
Actors: None

The “Three Overwhelmingly Cool” aspects of the party that we relied upon to make the party successful were:

– The Mine Ride – for both it’s “grand” entrance quality to being able to ride it later around and around the house (with the drop on the way out) and the shooting gallery that went with it
– The fact the mining town in the backyard and the saloon entrance into our house that was 100% themed such that you couldn’t see the house really immersed you
– food and drink and band

Videos of the Night of the Event:

Image Gallery 1 of the Night of the Event:

Image Gallery 2 of the Night of the Event

Image Gallery 3 of the Night of the Event

Video Gallery of the Construction of the Event:

Image Gallery of Construction of the Event:

Video Gallery of the Process of Mine Ride Construction:

Video Gallery of the Media of the Event: