Favorite Rollercoaster(s)

[NinjaPoodle]

Originally posted by sherbertlemons
I really, really, really wanna go to Cedar Point.

Me too.

I also want to get to Six Flaggs over Texas. Actually what I REALLY want to do is take a month long trip around the US and hit ALL of the BIG coasters. I'm sick of watching the coaster programs on the Discovery channels and feeling absolute ENVY of the people riding the scream machines I want to ride! ( was that whiney enough?)

A local fave of mine is the Giant Dipper at Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk. Also at SC, the Mouse Trap--each car seats only two peeps.

At Six Flags Marine World:

*Medusa -floorless steel

*Roar--classic wooden

*Boomerange--steel--shoots ya' forward through 2 corkscrews and one vertical loop then sends you through them again--backwards

*VERTICAL VELOCITY 2
(from the SFMW website)
The New and Improved Vertical Velocity provides a whole new angle on Thrills. Strap in and fly the fast track this summer aboard Midwest's Most Extreme Thrill Ride Ever! Vertical Velocity, or V2 for short, is a suspended spiraling impulse coaster that utilizes an advance design electromagnetic propulsion system to launch riders to speeds of up to 70 mph in less than four seconds. Thrill seekers rocket forward and backward, straight up and straight back down two 150-foot vertical sky towers. A spiraling corkscrew atop the first vertical tower gives you a wicked whirl just as you reach its already dizzying heights. Maximum height requirement is 75".

*Kong--footless steel coaster

At Six Flags Magic Mountain
Last time I was there I was around 7 or 8 and didn't get to go on the big rides--I was too short. So now as adult I have to get my butt down there and ride!

At Disneyland:
Roger Rabbit--it's not a "real" coaster but I enjoyed it.
The Teacups--Leave me alone, It's a classic--enough said.

I really didnt care too much for D-land. I think it's mor for the little ones.

At Paramounts Great America:

*Top Gun-- from PGA webiste:
Time to take off on TOP GUN, the incredible suspended Òjet coaster.Ó Soar through a 360-degree vertical loop, two 270-degree afterburn turns, a full-circle wingover, and a zero gravity roll. If thatÕs not enough, you take this 50-mile-per-hour flight in a floorless coach, suspended below the coasterÕs steel track.

*Invertigo
Face fearÑand your friends, as you race through loops and boomerangs, and then back again! First youÕre pulled up 138 feet above the ground. Then, speed down the lift, and shoot up into a Òboomerang,Ó a 180-degree turn with double inverted side-winders. Exploding out of the boomerang, head into a 72-foot-high vertical loop before rocketing to the top of the second 138-foot lift. YouÕll have just enough time to catch your breath before you do the whole thing again in the opposite direction.

*Vortex
The Vortex features a 91-foot lift hill, a 360-degree loop and weaving, twisting track that threads its way through the eye of the loop. You ride standing and straddling bicycle-type seats in trains that travel up to 45 miles an hour. Padded shoulder harnesses secure the riders - four abreast - in their cars.

*Demon--an old classic steel
Experience airtime and multiple loops as you encounter The DemonÉ As the Òsenior memberÓ of the roller coaster contingent at ParamountÕs Great America, this ride still packs a punch! One of the first coasters I got to ride as a growing kid!

*Stealth

Experience the World's First Flying Coaster. It's more than a ride-it's a flight of body, mind and spirit. Experience flight without floors, walls or ceilings as you soar through surprising twists and turns.

[kddani]

Originally posted by 33girl
awww, Danielle, come on.

How can a Pittsburgher have any answer to this question other than the Jackrabbit and/or Thunderbolt?

For the uninitiated, these are wooden coasters, originally built in the 20's, and the older they get, the crankier they get and the more they spank you hard.

http://www.kennywood.com/cr.cfm

Sheila, i don't like to be spanked, thank you very much.
Lol.
Actually i've found that i'm getting older and can't take some of that stuff anymore. When i was younger i was insane- i'd ride everything.

I'm still insane in that i'll ride pretty much anything, but the rickety stuff really gets to me now. And i hate to have a headache the rest of the day!

[sherbertlemons]

Originally posted by NinjaPoodle
Actually what I REALLY want to do is take a month long trip around the US and hit ALL of the BIG coasters. I'm sick of watching the coaster programs on the Discovery channels and feeling absolute ENVY of the people riding the scream machines I want to ride! ( was that whiney enough?)

Oh, I've always dreamed of doing that. I really wanna go to kennywood and ride their woodies, and actually there are several historic parks in New England I'd kill to visit. I'd love get up the nerve to go to Coney Island (I hear it's a really rough area) and ride the Cyclone.

[kddani]

Originally posted by sherbertlemons
Oh, I've always dreamed of doing that. I really wanna go to kennywood and ride their woodies, and actually there are several historic parks in New England I'd kill to visit. I'd love get up the nerve to go to Coney Island (I hear it's a really rough area) and ride the Cyclone.

Come visit Pittsburgh! We can have a Kennywood outing with 33girl, AngelPhiSig, KillarneyRose can make a trip in- and anyone else who'd wanna come

[NinjaPoodle]

Originally posted by kddani
Come visit Pittsburgh! We can have a Kennywood outing with 33girl, AngelPhiSig, KillarneyRose can make a trip in- and anyone else who'd wanna come

Ooo! I wanna' go!

[UFSigKap]

My favorite roller coaster by far is The HULK at Universal's Islands of Adventure. But I am also a little biased since I worked there for 2 years.

My dream is to go to Cedar Point!

[Lady Pi Phi]

The Mighty Canadian Minebuster at Paramount Canada's Wonderland...THE best wooden rollercoaster EVER!!!!

I've been to Cedar Point, but never got a chance to go on Millenium Force, the line up was too long. Hopefully this summer. I have relatives that live in Sandusky.

[LXAAlum]

LONG story, but NEW COASTER at CEDAR POINT - please, if anyone gets to ride this bad boy, post a review.

Cedar Point is one of my "have to" destinations in life!


Roller coaster lovers get a new high — 420 feet

By Gene Sloan, USA TODAY



Bragging rights: Dragster opens to the public Sunday in Sandusky, Ohio. Its vital statistics: ride lasts 30 seconds; track is 420-feet high; coaster travels 120 mph; it cost $25 million.View video clip

SANDUSKY, Ohio — "Omigod, omigod, omigod! I mean, WOW! It's just sheer speed! Omigod! Unbelievable. You just blast forward. You just spiral up. It's wild, wild! Omigod! ... "

Tim Walsh of Cleveland just stepped off Top Thrill Dragster, the new roller coaster here at Cedar Point amusement park, and he's talking a mile-a-minute to his wife on a cell phone. Or, should we say, talking at his wife. She doesn't seem to be getting much of a chance to respond.

"This is a 10. This is definitely a 10," says Walsh, the 42-year-old moderator of coasterbuzz.com. Walsh was one of nearly 800 journalists, company executives and invited guests at the park Thursday for the official unveiling of the coaster, the tallest and fastest ever. "It seemed like we were going up forever."

Well, almost forever. Spurred by advances in technology, amusement parks have plowed millions over the past decade into a new generation of rides that go faster and higher than once thought possible. But nothing has come close to this.

The much-ballyhooed roller coaster, opening to the public Sunday, soars 420 feet — a third higher than the current record holder. And it hits 120 miles per hour, nearly twice as fast as most coasters.

"This is extreme," says Paul Ruben, an editor at Park World magazine, gazing up at the ride's soaring red tracks. "This raises the bar for coasters worldwide."

Outdoing the Magnum XL

Until the 1980s, coasters in the 100-foot range were considered giants. And when Cedar Point launched the first coaster over 200 feet in 1989, many figured it would never be topped.

Now that ride, the 205-foot-tall Magnum XL, just a few hundred feet down the midway here, seems almost puny in comparison with Dragster.

Dragster is so tall that even some coaster enthusiasts "are a bit nervous," says Justin Garvanovic, editor of First Drop, a coaster trade magazine based in London. In the end, the die-hards will ride it, he says. But the general public? "I think it's going to be more watched than ridden."

Many here Thursday noted that Dragster isn't the most complex of coasters. It basically shoots straight up then straight down (though it does spiral 270 degrees as it descends). It lasts just 17 seconds.

But complexity isn't the point. This ride is all about speed. And height. "It's sort of a one-trick ride," says Garvanovic, who jokes that even with a $400 discount ticket from London, the ride is costing him $20 a second. "But that's okay. It's a good trick."

For decades, Cedar Point has had a reputation as the park with the tallest, fastest and wildest coasters. But in recent years, its dominance has come under challenge. In 2000, it launched Millennium Force, the first coaster over 300 feet, only to be topped just a few months later by a coaster in Japan.

With Dragster, Cedar Point clearly is sending a message to its fans, as well as its competitors, that it "plans to do what it has to do" to stay on top, says Tim O'Brien of Amusement Business magazine.

Indeed, Dragster isn't just taller than that Japanese coaster, the Steel Dragon at Fujiku Highlands amusement park. It's more than 100 feet taller. It's even taller than Six Flags Magic Mountain's Superman ride, a 415-foot-high attraction that the park touted as the world's tallest coaster (purists say it isn't a coaster since it doesn't make a complete loop).

Many coaster fans are still in "disbelief," says Carole Sanderson, president of ACE, an association of coaster enthusiasts. She recalls an ACE banquet a few years ago where someone asked the speaker, a ride designer, when to expect a 400-foot coaster. "Everyone laughed and our president (at the time) told the man to sit down."

Still, Dragster is just the latest showstopper to arrive at parks, says Sanderson, noting that coasters are not only getting taller but more exotic.

"We have evolved from going upside down in the late '70s to standing up, having our feet dangle, sitting floorless, laying down, spinning in circles and spinning on the outside perimeter of the track," she says.

Rubens calls it an arms race between major parks. "This is just the latest salvo," he says. "We're in a coaster renaissance."

Choosing hydraulic power

What's driving a period of coaster creation that many here call unprecedented? Gary Slade, editor of Amusement Today magazine, credits the arrival of computer-assisted design, which allows engineers to plot far more ambitious rides.

"Even into the early '90s, a lot of (ride designs) were hand drawn," he notes. "Now you have one guy at a computer doing the work that used to require a team of 12."

Advances in propulsion systems also are playing a role. For decades, coasters operated on a simple formula. A chain would pull a train up the hill, release it and let gravity do the rest. But in the 1990s, ride designers began experimenting with new technologies designed for other industries that they realized could boost coaster speeds.

One hot technology of recent years, the linear induction motor — a takeoff on the magnet motors that move bullet trains — has been the force behind many of the new coasters. But Cedar Point and Intamin, the Swiss ride manufacturer that constructed Dragster, had to come up with something even better to get its coaster cars up to 400 feet. A linear induction motor powerful enough to do that "might drain all of Sandusky, Ohio of power," says Rob Decker, Cedar Point's head of design.

Their solution: hydraulic power. Dragster is only the second coaster to use it. A smaller coaster that opened last year at Cedar Point's sister park in California, Knott's Berry Farm, was a test case for the new technology.

The hydraulic motors blast the trains, which are designed to look like dragster race cars with giant fins and Goodyear tires on their backs, from zero to 120 mph in 4 seconds — so fast that bystanders can see the skin on people's faces pushed backwards.

"I felt like my lips were being pulled back behind my ears," says Lee Jolly, a morning show anchor from the CBS affiliate in Youngstown, Ohio.

"It pins you in your seat. And then all of a sudden we were going straight up," says Jeff Putz, the editor of coasterbuzz.com.

Putz says the ride definitely is intense, and it's probably good it's a relatively short one. "It's just at that borderline threshold. If it was any longer it would be too much."

Thrilling but safe

Critics of amusement park safety such as Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., who has unsuccessfully pushed legislation to tighten government oversight of parks for several years, say the race to build ever-bigger rides has worrisome ramifications for parkgoers.

But park officials say the new technology only helps make rides safer. During the coaster heyday of the 1920s, rides were built more by "intuition" than a good understanding of physics on the human body, and "some of the early loops were probably very painful. There were probably some horrendous G-forces," Decker says.

But now every turn and every loop of a new coaster is analyzed by computers for potential harm on the body. "Our number-one design criteria was (keeping within) the safe limits of the human body," he says. "We want the bragging rights, but we wouldn't spend the first nickel if we didn't know with all certainty that we could accomplish this goal."

Cedar Point added some high-tech safety devices to the ride, including a braking system that uses magnets to slow the trains. If the ride loses power, the brakes automatically deploy. Moreover, there are three separate restraining systems to hold riders in place.

Cedar Point and Intamin also designed the ride with broad turns, which reduces the forces on the body. "It's very smooth," Putz says.

Of course, all this new technology doesn't amount to much unless it provides parkgoers what they want. Is a roller coaster that soars almost as high as the Washington Monument really something the general public is demanding? Some park watchers wonder.

"The more extreme the ride, the lower the percentage of people (who) will ride it," says O'Brien. "You get to the point where you have to figure out if (it's) worth it."

Dick Kinzel, CEO of the park's parent company, Cedar Fair, says the buzz over the ride will no doubt boost attendance, as every other new coaster has in the past. But even he admits its audience is limited. "The percentage of people who ride this is going to be much smaller than any of our other coasters."

That said, every year parkgoers arrive with a higher tolerance for fear, says O'Brien. "People are looking for extreme activities. Wall climbing, sky diving and bungee all led the way."

Rides of this size also have what industry pundits call the spectator factor. Even if many park visitors take a pass on riding it, they're intrigued about it and will want to see it in action, says Slade. Cedar Point, in fact, expects so many gawkers that it built bleachers alongside the track — believed to be a first at a park.

So will we see coasters go even higher than 420 feet?

Someday, but probably not for a long time, say industry watchers. Dragster already is pushing the limits of what is possible for one big reason: money. "We may have the technology to go higher and faster," Slade says. "But the question is how much are parks willing to pay to do it?"

Dragster cost $25 million, an almost unheard of sum for a ride at a seasonal park that only has 130 days to make its year. More typically, parks spend about $8 million to $16 million to put in a coaster. Smaller coasters go for as little as $3 million to $5 million.

After the whirlwind pace of record-setting coaster building over the decade, many in the industry expect parks to take a breather.

"You never say never," says Kinzel. "But certainly I think 420 feet is going to be the highest we and probably any park will go for quite a while."

[kddani]

looks like I might be the first person from GC to ride it!
i'll be going to Cedar Point on the 15th. I have the feeling this ride is going to scare the sh!t out of me.
It'll be awesome!

[NinjaPoodle]

Originally posted by kddani
looks like I might be the first person from GC to ride it!
i'll be going to Cedar Point on the 17th. I have the feeling this ride is going to scare the sh!t out of me.
It'll be awesome!

Why can't that be ME!?!?

BTW, have a great time!

[ZTAMich]

I hate upside down roller coasters and will probably never go on one
I have been on
Disney's Big ThunderMtn, Space Mtn & Splash Mtn
Hershey Park: Comet!

[kddani]

I love this quote from the article:
"The hydraulic motors blast the trains, which are designed to look like dragster race cars with giant fins and Goodyear tires on their backs, from zero to 120 mph in 4 seconds ? so fast that bystanders can see the skin on people's faces pushed backwards."

Hehehe. Bring it on.

[bethany1982]

I like all the coasters at Paramount's Great America, but the Superman coaster at Magic Mountain is my favorite.

[AOX81]

Originally posted by kddani
looks like I might be the first person from GC to ride it!
i'll be going to Cedar Point on the 15th.

Sorry, I beat you.

I rode the new Top Thrill Dragster ride at Cedar Point on Saturday. One word...FAST You definitely have to ride in the front seat!!!

I'm glad I got to go to the park the day before it opened to the public because I know that the lines for this ride are definitely going to be LONG!!!!

[Jill1228]

Coaster Fanatic here! I am dying to go to Roller Coaster Mecca. Cedar Point!

I LOVED the Magnum and the Raptor

The last parks I have hit were:
Sea World, Busch Gardens Williamsburg, Paramount KD, Busch Gardens Tampa and Playland in Vancouver, BC

I also love the Manhattan Express at NY NY hotel in Vegas. Also Desperado is cool. Will do Speed The Ride at the Sahara