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Ride videos of Falcon at Duinrell in the Netherlands. This little Gerstlauer coaster is probably the closest existing equivalent to Canobie Lake's new ride, Untamed, which opens in a couple of weeks. (Rage at Southend also has the identical layout, but its garish yellow and purple appearance is very different; Untamed's rustic theming is very similar to Falcon but with grizzly bears instead of froggies.)
It's really short—as the comments on the videos often say, maybe twenty seconds of actual coaster ride from the top of the vertical lift. But those twenty seconds involve a beyond-vertical drop, a loop, an Immelmann and a zero-g roll in immediate succession (then around in a circle and back to the station). I think the idea is to pack as much disorientation as possible into a tiny space.
I've also been admiring this site about Anton Schwarzkopf's classic steel coasters.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
derspatchel had told me that this company (and its engineer Werner Stengel) had made Magic Mountain's Revolution and Hersheypark's SooperDooperLooper, two of the first modern coasters to have a vertical loop (Arrow's simple corkscrew coasters had just barely beaten them to inversion, but these loops were relatively huge). What I had not known was that they went on to specialize in vertical loops to the point of sheer unbelievability. Some of those huge loops on the Thriller (now operating as the Tsunami at Islas San Marcos in Aguascalientes, Mexico) look nearly circular; they must be taxing to ride. The really amazing thing about these gigantic multi-loopers is that they're made to be portable and tour around on the funfair circuit.
Probably the most infamous one is West Edmonton Mall's Mindbender, the site of a horrific fatal 1986 accident apparently caused by a combination of design issues, lax maintenance and improper inspection procedures (it was impossible to tell whether the wheel bogies were about to fall off without removing the cars from the track, but the manual telling people to do this had never been translated into English in the chaos following Schwarzkopf's bankruptcy). Amazingly, it's still operating with redesigned cars.
What puts the scale of these 1980s machines into perspective for me is that the Mindbender, which was based on a portable design and is operating inside a shopping mall (granted, a mind-bogglingly huge one), is in every relevant dimension larger than Busch Gardens' Loch Ness Monster, which in my old brain is the paradigmatic big roller coaster.
It's really short—as the comments on the videos often say, maybe twenty seconds of actual coaster ride from the top of the vertical lift. But those twenty seconds involve a beyond-vertical drop, a loop, an Immelmann and a zero-g roll in immediate succession (then around in a circle and back to the station). I think the idea is to pack as much disorientation as possible into a tiny space.
I've also been admiring this site about Anton Schwarzkopf's classic steel coasters.
derspatchel had told me that this company (and its engineer Werner Stengel) had made Magic Mountain's Revolution and Hersheypark's SooperDooperLooper, two of the first modern coasters to have a vertical loop (Arrow's simple corkscrew coasters had just barely beaten them to inversion, but these loops were relatively huge). What I had not known was that they went on to specialize in vertical loops to the point of sheer unbelievability. Some of those huge loops on the Thriller (now operating as the Tsunami at Islas San Marcos in Aguascalientes, Mexico) look nearly circular; they must be taxing to ride. The really amazing thing about these gigantic multi-loopers is that they're made to be portable and tour around on the funfair circuit.Probably the most infamous one is West Edmonton Mall's Mindbender, the site of a horrific fatal 1986 accident apparently caused by a combination of design issues, lax maintenance and improper inspection procedures (it was impossible to tell whether the wheel bogies were about to fall off without removing the cars from the track, but the manual telling people to do this had never been translated into English in the chaos following Schwarzkopf's bankruptcy). Amazingly, it's still operating with redesigned cars.
What puts the scale of these 1980s machines into perspective for me is that the Mindbender, which was based on a portable design and is operating inside a shopping mall (granted, a mind-bogglingly huge one), is in every relevant dimension larger than Busch Gardens' Loch Ness Monster, which in my old brain is the paradigmatic big roller coaster.