Something I haven't seen much discussion about with regard to any development "beyond" Big Thunder is how the ride's vehicle storage/maintenance building is poorly located for future expansion in that area. In the image below, the maintenance building is circled in red, with the spur track (including railroad crossing) roughly drawn in blue. While that location beyond the berm likely made sense when the ride was built, in 2024 it's plopped right in the middle of the easiest expansion pad.
If the ride is going to be closed for an extended period, that would be the logical time to relocate this building to a less conspicuous area to allow for future development. This has the potential to impact to the railroad as well, but hopefully that work could be done in a way that minimizes downtime and/or is done in overnight hours, unlike how the Tron work was handled. There are a variety of backstage uses that would need to be reconfigured to allow an expansion of guest space in the area west of BTMRR, so this would just be one piece to solving that puzzle.
I really wish some people would try and think about the bigger picture of logistically how a theme park needs to be run and not how they want one to be. It's not even just theme park logic, it's business logic.
Unfortunately WDW has for the most part deferred any meaningful maintenance on most of their attractions for 10+ years which has conditioned guests to expect everything to be open all the time.
Look over at Tokyo (know for being the best maintained Disney Park) and Paris (who's been playing catch up for 20 years of maintenance they couldn't previously afford over the last 10 years) where there is nearly always a major attraction plus some mid/minor attractions closed as well.
I know Paris better but in the last 10 years Thunder, Phantom, Pirates, IASW have all had 1 year + refurbishments whilst literally every other attraction in the park has been closed for 3-9 months. This is in addition to periodic 1-3 month refurbs. And many of these overlap massively. The result is the rides are much more up to modern standards in Paris than WDW... LED lighting, new sound systems, modern safety systems, improved emergency egress, asbestos free, improved cast environment. WDW is so far behind.
Part of the problem is that all four of WDW’s parks have been so underinvested for so long that they simply don’t have the capacity to take much of anything offline for long enough to do the necessary maintenance. WDW has spent the last decade-plus doing everything they can to avoid building new attractions despite increasing attendance, leaving the parks in a state that require nearly everything to be operating every day of the year. Obviously this is an unrealistic expectation in a world of moving parts and heavy usage, where things naturally wear down and require maintenance, but it’s where we are at the moment.
To have adequate capacity slack to allow a basic ongoing maintenance regime, each park needs
at least 2-3 more E-tickets and a handful of minor attractions. This would allow the park to continue to function while attractions are closed for maintenance during off-peak periods and provide extra capacity for peak periods (Christmas, spring break, etc.) when everything can operate simultaneously. We've had rumblings for years about how a park will fianlly be able to catch-up on major maintenance for certain aging major attractions once a new attraction opens (Pandora/Everest, Tron/Space Mountain, Tiana/Big Thunder, etc.), but in reality this never seems to be the case as attendance continues to grow faster than capacity.
This isn't a matter of "it would be nice to have," it's one of the basics of business in the real world. While this issue exists to a degree everywhere, it is especially bad in WDW, where attendance growth has outstripped ride (and to a lesser extent, dining) capacity for so long. Having additional overall attraction capacity would allow them to close things intermittently for regular maintenance and extended refurbishments without significant impacts to the park experience.
