Check the pitch of the playfield. If you dont see anything obvious, take the plastic out set it on a flat surface and hit it with a torch to flatten out, be very fast and careful a ball will not travel through a puddle of goo.

Clean it, novus 2 it, wax it, if that dont work torch it. They do build up gunk from time to time this could be your problem. Anyways im sure it could use a good cleaning anyway.

Im scared of torching my ramps/subways! LOL!
Can you add a couple of washers to one side of the subway that can increase the pitch of the plastic? I think I had a similar issue on one of my games and 2-3 metal washers under one side did the trick.

Good idea, torches can be very bad if you don't know what you are doing. Washers may be a good fix if you are not confident I have never tried but it makes sense.

I have the exact same problem. I noticed your subway seems to be attached at the exit hole by some kind of putty? Mine is cracked and not attached at that point. I plan to do the same thing to mine (cleaning/waxing). The ball getting stuck there has been extremely frustrating.

It is probably the switch. Make sure the switch is easily going down. Also make sure the metal portion of the switch extending into the subway is bent in such a way that it can freely move, while still making contact with the ball. That switch gets banged up. Another common problem is that it gets bent so that it is no longer making contact with the ball and therefore the switch is not registering.

Your subway is sagging really bad...that's why it is getting stuck. The left side of the subway in the picture should be in line with the right by the popper. Level it out!

Make sure EVERYTHING is leveled properly.

It's about a 5 minute job to remove...really.

Yeah. Get a screwdriver with the interchangable bits and I believe that is the right size for the screws holding it down. Tip up the playfield, unscrew it, clean it and check it out. It totally looks like it is sagging badly, and it may be missing a screw or screws to hold it better in place.

If you got slowly and spend longer doing it, so be it - but the other option is that it will eventually start happening again and you'll have to pay someone to fix it if you can't do it yourself. If you've got the money, then no problem - in that case hire someone now! If not, you can do it, I promise.

Finally, I have never needed to torch any ramps because they were dirty. You torch a ramp if you are super particular about it's look and want to make it shine like new, but for an under playfield ramp I cannot think of one reason that I would ever do it. Cleaning it would help - if nothing else, it will help keep the gunk from coming up on the playfield - but your issue really is that it is sagging.

Reopening this thread after a bit, as I have a similar issue. My problem is related to the ball not always firing up to the right flipper. Most of the time it does, but occasionally it just sits there underneath the playfield and doesn't fire up until the machine goes through it's entire switch cycle while it looks for the lost ball.

I can see through the glass that the ball is there, so it's defiitely not getting stuck in the subway, and the ball always fires when the switch is triggered - it just seems like it's not always recognizing that there's a ball there?

I had this problem. In my case, the prongs on the plastic piece the ball sits on in the VUK had worn down. So when the ball got to the VUK, it fired but because the prongs were pretty much gone the ball got pushed back into the subway. Or sometimes the VUK wouldn't even fire because the ball wasn't all the way seated. The piece I'm talking about is in the top right of this pic

565-0029-01 (resized).jpg

Ok, I'll see if I can take a look at mine to see what it looks like, worn wise. I'd say it probably happens to me around 10% of the time, doesn't seem to matter if it comes from the T-Rex or the Scoop (not that it would).

I had same problem. Solenoid would fire but ball would not always make it up to the metal ramp and out to playfield.
On my game, one of the legs of the wire form had a broken weld at the base. The loose leg would absorb the energy and the ball would fall back down. I put a hose clamp around the four wire "legs" about 13 years ago and it has not been a problem since. The clamp is hidden by the plastic. Fyi

It's a pain. Things happen so fast, you can't really see what's happening to it, and it's just in a hard area to see anyways.

I had the same issue. Ball would sometimes not make it all the way up, and sometimes roll back in the subway like the OP shows. I tried flattening out the subway, but it still happens once maybe every 100 tries. So not very often.

For me, my issue is due to the subway mounting tabs breaking off. A previous owner riveted new metal tabs to mount, and the ball would hit one of those rivots on the way up, causing it to lose momentum, or shift the momentum so that it just had no angle to continue through the ramp.

I sanded the rivot down until it was nearly flush with the plastic. That helped for a while, but then it started to have issues again. Then I discovered the way the subway was mounted was shifted over just a tiny bit. So the ball was also hitting a lip on the subway itself. So I sanded that back.

I'd start by rebuilding the coil first. Replace the core, the cradle, and the core sleeve. If that doesn't fix it, inspect the path for any obstructions. Any overhang of anything. Even the smallest, insignificant obstructions. Then, try to take a close look at the wireform and you may need to slightly reposition it. It can move a couple mm's, and that's most likely all it will need.

Well shoot. I just re-read this. Sounds like you may just need to replace the switch that gets triggered when the ball is in the cradle.

So the ball cradle is mounted on the core so that it moves up and down. There's a spring that pushes it out, but when a ball sits on it, it pushes down onto an arm connected to a switch. Inspect that.

My guess is a wire just broke loose. Look for a wire, and solder it back on. If that's not it.

Make sure that when the cradle is down, it engages that switch. If not, figure out what you need to do to it. Also run a test and see if the coil fires manually by hand with that switch. If not, it's time to replace, or maybe is just looks fine, but you may have a cold solder joint.

That's my guess at what's going on.

I pulled up the playfield last night and realized the switch was totally the problem! It looked like it wasn't always getting hit by the plunger that would push it down by the weight of the ball.

I bent the contact a bit and also added some tape to it (lol) to give it some more surface area. So far, seems to be working like a charm! First fix on my first machine, feels like quite the victory!

Nice!