CHECKLIST TEMPLATE
Lockout/tagout (LOTO) procedure for rides, mechanical attractions, and high-risk equipment during maintenance.
Most attraction and venue operators treat the Ride Lockout/Tagout Procedure as a box-ticking exercise — and the ones who do are the ones who pay for it the hardest later. LOTO is a legal requirement under workplace safety regulations in most jurisdictions. The purpose of a disciplined checklist isn't to slow your team down; it's to make those failure modes impossible by building the catch into the workflow itself.
The good news is that this checklist runs in roughly 25 minutes once your team is used to it. Of the 10 total steps, 8 are marked critical — these cannot be skipped, rushed, or signed off from across the room. The work itself is designed to be owned by a senior staff member or manager — it's not a good fit for first-week hires, which means the savings scale as the habit settles — early runs are slower as staff learn to spot what they're looking for, and steady-state runs are faster than the time spent chasing the same problem in customer complaints after the fact.
This Ride Lockout/Tagout Procedure is written for seasonal attractions, year-round museums and venues, experience centres, aerial parks, and ticketed venues of all sizes. The steps are calibrated to the realities of small-team operations (one person may be running it between customer interactions) and stay useful as you scale — the same checklist works for a busy Saturday in peak season as it does for a quiet Tuesday in April.
Treat the version below as the starting point, not the destination. As you run the Ride Lockout/Tagout Procedure for a full season, you'll notice patterns specific to your operation — a particular model of equipment that fails earlier than the rest, a step that surfaces a recurring issue nobody's fixing upstream, a time-of-day when completions get rushed. Capturing those observations and feeding them back into the checklist is what turns a generic template into a genuine operational asset. That is exactly the kind of living, team-shared, auto-logged document EquipDash is built to host — so the checklist doesn't just live on someone's clipboard, it becomes part of the shop's compounding institutional memory.
Work through each step on every application. Critical steps must pass before the item leaves the shop.
Ride going offline. Confirm no guests on board. Close entry gate.
Park ride at maintenance position per manufacturer spec. Safe energy state.
Main disconnect switched to OFF. All energy sources isolated: electrical, hydraulic, pneumatic.
Each worker applies personal padlock to disconnect. No worker relies on another's lock.
Tag with date, time, worker name, reason, expected restart.
Test: attempt to start ride from operator console. Should be fully dead.
Carry out the planned work.
Clear work area. Ensure nothing left on ride.
Each worker removes own lock. Last person to remove re-verifies work complete.
Empty ride test cycle. All safety systems verified working before guest operations resume.
Build this into your regular operational rotation. In a small shop, the opener runs this as part of morning prep. In larger shops, dedicate a technician or staffer to the task during the opening hour. If you run EquipDash, attach the checklist to the relevant asset or booking so completions log automatically and build a maintenance history.
Every time a ride goes offline for maintenance, not just at end-of-season. Every worker. Every time.
LOTO is the line between safe maintenance and deadly maintenance. Discipline is the only thing that keeps workers alive. Train, document, enforce.
Yes, under HSE/OSHA regulations in US/UK/EU for any maintenance on powered equipment.
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