Jim S.

You didn't happen to ask him how we can ever again believe anything he says, since he said that it was going to be repaired for next year?

Can you imagine how ridiculous they're going to look if they sell it and somebody actually gets it running properly?

For the record, Dick Knoebel said that the cars would only have seatbelts. So that answers that question. They were only testing two chassis with 1.5 bodies on them. I didn't ask if all 5 chassis had been tested as a train yet, or whether this was the final body design (although it was obviously more refined than the prototype seen earlier this summer.) It's amazingly quiet and smooth in the trough. It's loud and shaky on the straight track, even though it's going slow there, so hopefully they're still working on that. Yesterday I saw lots of filing and sanding going on on the lift hills.

Mealworms are dry and have a fairly rigid skin and are not at all disgusting (although I don't know what they look/feel like if they get smashed). It sounds like a good way to get season passes, I wish I lived closer to Six Flags.

Does anyone know if Thunderhawk is going to be closed during the day for the Halloween events, or just at night? (I do like that coaster, even though it's rough as hell.) And what's Dorney's policy on closing coasters due to low temperatures? I'll hopefully be going the weekend after PPP, but that's no guarantee that it will stay warm.

I'm not sure what you're getting at. All mice have straight drops and sudden 90* turns. In fact, most of them have more turns than this one. Somewhere in the world there's another suspended mouse, with a layout more like a normal mouse except they did bank the turns on it: http://www.amusementvideo.com/view_video.php?viewkey=23406c6cecf84a7ebb0f

Sometime this summer, the Knoebels Twister entrance ramp picked up a bunch of blatant grafitti and the exit ramp picked up a huge amount of gum. It's not world-class bad, but it's shocking because it was never like that before.

The layout image is on their website: http://www.knoebels.com/images/TurnsLayoutA.gif The first lift is between the station and the helix, the second is between the helix and the main set of turns, and the third is between the brake run and the station where it will also serve as an additional block since they'll be running three trains. I'm disappointed that they didn't manage to finish it this year. All summer long, everyone thought it would be open for PPP if not before. I've really got to wonder how well they thought out this whole transfer track thing, seeing that the upper one isn't even started yet and the lower one doesn't look very far along. (The storage track is going to be wrapped around the helix somehow!)

Yeah, like Hershey can't afford to have somebody else host a tiny website.

When I was at Great Adventure in July, they were handing out cards about the smoking policy at the ticket windows. If Great America isn't doing that, they should. I don't remember if I heard anything over the loudspeakers about the policy at GAdv.

1) Because the gravity is still the same. 2) Exclusive Ride Time 3) In My Opinion

Although I'm disappointed that the Flying Turns didn't open this summer, I've heard that construction on the two missing pieces of track is in progress, and the first train is supposed to arrive soon. The brochure for PPP this year is calling it "Phoenix Phall Phunfest with a Twist and anything else we can come up with", so I wouldn't be surprised to see it open for one or two days this year. A steel coaster, other than a "family" one or maybe a mouse, would be out of character for Knoebels, not to mention probably not fitting anywhere (you really don't want a Vekoma boomerang, do you?) I don't think there's anything terribly wrong with the ride selection. Don't like it? Just use tickets. (Although there have been days when I've wished I had bought an armband because I had so many coaster rides.)

Best: El Toro opening on a day it was announced as closed. Worst: Half of the coasters at Hershey being closed due to low temperatures.

While it's true that Knoebels doesn't have a gourmet signature food attraction like some of the places that were on the Food Network program recently, the diversity of food there is incredible. If you're judging them on just the pizza and the picnic catering (which I didn't like the one time I had it, but I heard it changed), you need to check out more of the restaurants! Have a look at the menus: http://www.knoebels.com/food.asp

Doing away with the Maxx Pass is a terrible idea for people who don't live in Ohio. I was going to get a Maxx Pass at Dorney next year and use it for a multi-day trip to CP. Since I was going to stay at one of the hotels in the park, I would be getting free parking and early admission, so why should I now have to pay extra for those? And this is on top of having to pay more for the Platinum Pass than I would've paid by getting my Maxx Pass through Dorney instead of CP. And like DerekRx said, it's a terrible idea for people who don't go solo, because only one person per carload needs a parking pass!

"All statements are true in some sense, false in some sense, meaningless in some sense, true and false in some sense, true and meaningless in some sense, false and meaningless in some sense, and true and false and meaningless in some sense." -- Principia Discordia, or How I Found Goddess And What I Did To Her When I Found Her Even if the Nantimi company is a fake, that doesn't mean that the website can't be produced by Hershey. It's called viral marketing, look it up. The name Tsunami, the wave imagery, and the surfing connection aren't inconsistent with a Maverick-type coaster. Think of the profile of the 95-degree drop as a wave curling over.

An online patent search might be useful.

Although leaving the lap bar up on Nitro doesn't seem like the smartest thing in the world (it was plenty scary banking in a sideless train with it all the way down), the park really didn't seem to allow airtime when I was there last month. They pulled my seat belt tight on Rolling Thunder! I've ridden the back seat of Phoenix enough to know that seat belts aren't even necessary at all on most wood coasters.

I was glad to see today that all the brake cylinders seem to be in place. On the other hand, I don't know how many more footers they need for the transfer switches, and in fact at the roadside by the helix there were two footers that had been yanked out of somewhere.

Something similar happened to me on Steel Force on a crowded hot day at Dorney last month. Something had evidently happened earlier in the season to cause management to encourate the crew to get trains out faster, because they were really pushing them out fast. They were yelling at people to open the magnetic gates and get in the train as soon as they unlocked them. Then if the guys checking restraints took too long, the guy at the controls would start counting off the seconds they were wasting after the previous train had cleared the block! In fact, when they did manage to get a cooperative load of riders without a bunch of crap to stow in the bins, they would get trains checked way before the block was clear. I was in line late at night when the guy at the back of the station started yelling and waving at the person at the controls to NOT dispatch the train because he didn't know where one of the previous ones was. (It had got stuck on the brake before the bunny hops. Evidently a bad sensor or some other hardware malfunction was involved, because they didn't reopen the ride the rest of the night even though they kept running empty trains.) I would hope that the system wouldn't have let them actually dispatch another train, but the way he was yelling about it didn't inspire confidence! Maybe it would've stopped it on the lift and he didn't want to have to deal with evacuating multiple trains.

I respectufully disagree--running the video is neither "ironic" nor "moronic," but it is a nice nod to the park's history (and to the history of amusement parks in general). I withdraw the "moronic" comment. The "ironic" comment still stands. I don't mind that the ride wasn't preserved in its original state; what I mind is that the latest change is completely out of character with what has gone before -- it's no longer a haunted-house-style ride, not even a campy and unscary one, but childish and gaudy and commercialized.

^The same guy just said that it was open yesterday, he was basing his statement on something somebody else told him. Sorry for posting crap. ^^I know the Old Mill was changed several times, but I'm sure it was never anything like what it is today. Have you seen it? Putting up a video in the queue telling what it used to be is ironic, not to mention moronic.

That was my first thought when someone else said that they were at a baseball game and saw a sign that said "Get Ready To Drop In '08". Either that or a drop tower, but if "Perfect 10" refers to the 10 existing coasters it won't be a drop tower. Hopefully it'll be a coaster with a really huge drop. I'm sure a Frequent Faller would be intense but I don't see how it would be comfortable.

I've heard that they decided not to use the 1-bench trains because they don't want to take a chance on anything else going wrong with their plans for this coaster. I don't know if it's official though.

I just read on yet another board that the Gold Rusher is closed for the season, so something is definitely going on there. As for the history of the Old Mill, all the video did was make me wonder why they didn't keep it in its original form. Kennywood has demolished a lot of coasters over the years (according to RCDB, they had a 6-track steeplechase open for just one year!), but they seem to be all about preserving other rides (Kangaroo, Turtle, etc.)