The Seven Dwarfs Mine Train officially opened for business today after a week of soft openings.  As a result, the New Fantasyland project is now complete.  The expansion has brought the addition of another Dumbo ride, a re-themed Great Goofini ride to fit in more with the Storybook Circus location, Under the Sea – Journey of the Little Mermaid, Enchanted Tales with Belle, and the Seven Dwarfs Mine Train.  The project took three years to complete.  But today’s focus on the mine train.

The Seven Dwarfs Mine Train has a 38 inch (3 foot 2 inches) height requirement.

Theme Park Review has an excellent point-of-view video of the ride:

Disney Parks has a brief ad for the ride: 

As you could see from the video that the train does tilt from side-to-side.  This is to simulate the movement of a mine cart which do tilt from side-to-side as they move down the track.

Being a new ride, this ride is going to have long waits especially early in the day when people enter the parks.  Posted wait times, this morning, peaked 180 minutes (3 hours) while as of 10:45 am, the wait times have dropped to 120 minutes.  Still at 120 minutes making the wait for Seven Dwarfs Mine Train the longest in the Magic Kingdom.

The reason for the long wait times, besides popularity, is there are a maximum of five trains which be in use.  If Disney is running all five trains and releasing those trains roughly a minute apart, 1300 people can go through the ride per hour.

Well, Dad, what are some ways to reduce these wait times?  

First, you could arrive the parks and head directly to the ride.  However, you will not be the only person with this tactic in mind.  If your entire group is not fast on the feet, this is not a viable tactic.  Second, you could hold off on the ride until later in the day or evening and wait for the wait times to drop off.  But if your group are not all night owls, this tactic could not work for you because you could be waiting until after Wishes/10 pm for the wait times to drop.  The last tactic is probably the easiest: use one of your Fastpass+ reservations (I’m going to go in-depth about Fastpass+ in a later post).

The basics of Fastpass+ is 60 days before your vacation starts you can make three Fastpass+ reservations per day.  However, those initial three reservations must be within the same park.  The reservations are an hour window where guests can enter the Fastpass+ line and bypass the standby line.  Your reservations are only good for that hour window.  You can’t enter the line early and if you arrive late, you are out of luck.  After the “reservation windows” for the initial three Fastpass+ reservations have passed, you can make a fourth reservation at either the same park or a different park.

Thanks for taking a look Walt Disney World’s newest attraction and as always you can follow us on Facebook or like us on Twitter using the buttons on the right side of the page.

Thanks for reading!