halfway up wasn't so bad

[spatch]

The first day of coastering at Busch Gardens was a lot of fun. I am back in the hotel now exhausted as all hell, but very pleased with how it all turned out. I had planned to spend the busy Saturday taking pictures during my backstage coaster tour and then ride a lot on Sunday, but my shiny camera died while I was taking the slow elevator up Griffon's 210-foot lift hill. Oh. Well, then.

Turns out the batteries were at fault, but by the time I went "Wait, weren't those new batteries from the same pack that died in the TV remote? What if I just got some new ones?" I was too busy riding and having fun. I rode a lot today.

But here is the neat maintenance elevator that we rode to the top of the lift hill:



And here's what part of the ride looks like from halfway up (and then the camera died):



Busch Gardens is a beautiful park and there are lots of great places to take neat pictures of tangled tracks and foliage and trains and stuff. I'll visit them tomorrow with fresh batteries, and write a full trip story later on.

Comments

[spatch]

My grandparents lived in Pennsylvania and when I was 8 or so, I was convinced my grandpa was an awesome man because he rode the sooperdooperlooper twice.

He still is an awesome man for many other reasons, but that kind of bravery to me back then was just out of this world.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

For many years I was under the mistaken impression that the sooperdooperLooper had more than one loop, because of its name. It seems to be a common belief. At the time it was named, though, the mere possession of a loop was a relative novelty. The track does seem to be knotted through it, which is kind of nice. (It wasn't long, though, before Busch Gardens opened the Loch Ness Monster, with its iconic interlocking loops. The loss of the Big Bad Wolf is a blow, but it's impossible to imagine Busch Gardens without the Monster.)

[spatch]

I was assured by my coaster tour guide that while the Big Bad Wolf had outlived its maintenance date -- it had been expected to run 25 years, which it did -- the Loch Ness Monster features stock Arrow trains and parts, so they can get replacements as needed. When the Arrow corkscrew coaster Python closed at Busch Gardens Tampa, for instance, Williamsburg got the train.

And the sdL (bonus points for the capitalization!) is an early Schwarzkopf looper and yeah, the inversion was novel as all heck when it opened. I'll hafta check my history, but I'm reasonably sure it was the second modern loop coaster to open after Revolution at Magic Mountain.

The ride is also one of the very few looping coasters with only lapbars and no over-the-shoulder restraints, because Anton Schwarzkopf was a very smart man and knew that centripetal force would keep riders in their seats as they went upside down. Adding OTSRs would only give a psychological benefit, so I'm pleased Hersheypark hasn't done that. Magic Mountain did a while back.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

The history of loop-the-loops is so weird--first attempts in the 1850s, scattered instances in the early 20th century, then nothing until 1976 when suddenly there was an explosion of looping coasters. I'm guessing it just took a while for engineering to catch up to rising safety standards.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

1840s, actually.

The loops on the 19th-century looping coasters were very small, and it must have been neck-spraining hell to ride them.

[spatch]

The real change in loop design was the development of the teardrop-shaped clothoid loop, which is easier on the Gs both coming in and going out. Werner Stengel perfected that bad boy, but there was at least one other looping coaster at the turn of the 20th century at Coney Island which used a teardrop shape as well. Legend has it that the ride didn't make any money because more people wanted to watch it than ride it.

I have to wonder about that story, primarily because Coney will make money any way it can and charging spectators seems like the most obvious solution. They used to charge to watch people stick to the wall on the Hell Hole centrifuge, f'rinstance. So who knows.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

A few weeks ago I visited (the very nearby!) Canobie Lake Park for the first time. Since we were with a 3-year-old and I wasn't in a coastery mood anyway, we spend most of our time in the well-equipped kiddie zone and I didn't ride the roller coasters. But I did see their 1930s wooden coaster, the Yankee Cannonball, and would like to give it a try sometime.

What I didn't even realize at the time is that the park also has a smallish inverting steel coaster, the Canobie Corkscrew. What's more, it has an interesting history--it was actually one of the earliest corkscrews, built in the Seventies for an indoor amusement park in Illinois, then moved somewhere down South before it ended up at Canobie Lake. I'll have to give it a go as well.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...and it's an exact clone of the first modern steel inverting coaster, the Corkscrew at Knott's Berry Farm; another clone was the aforementioned Python of Busch Gardens Tampa.

And I now realize that the place where it was originally installed, Old Chicago, was the subject of a hilarious/sad feature I read a while back through a link at deadmalls.com.