Jim S.

I thought the Flying Turns was the only thing that didn't open promptly... They say the new steel coaster is supposed to open this summer. Unofficially I heard June. I haven't heard of anything being built yet, but it shouldn't take too long to put up a small steel coaster. The Golden Nugget, on the other hand... it'll be at least next year before they even start trying to do anything with that.

Looks like I was editing my message at the same time as you were posting. Oh well, I'm up too late on the east coast...

OK, thanks for the clarification. I know he used to work there full-time in maintenance, but for some reason I was under the impression that the engineering business was more of a consulting position, or a contractor who happens to work for the park a lot like the Len Adams gang. I don't know where I got that. It would be nice if the park would get the webcams running again (and put them in useful locations) so we could see what's going on rather than guessing.

If I understand correctly, the layout is taken from a former installation, but the construction techniques were changed. The cars are pretty much entirely a new design. The Flying Turns Project website had separate credits for "Design" and "Engineering". I interpreted it to mean that the "Designer" was doing the initial planning and the "Engineer" was verifying it, but I have no idea to what extent I'm right. Does anyone know what exactly John Fetterman does for a living? I'm assuming that the park doesn't keep him busy full-time. Apparently they announced at Eastcoaster that the problem with the cars bouncing on the track has been solved except for one instance near the end, but there was another problem involving the train going through the first helix too fast. I have no idea why this is supposed to be a problem, but they were considering enlarging the helix to extend out into the road that runs next to it. I would assume that they would have to tear it all out and start over, so it would probably take a while.

The park owns so many Halloween props, they could go down the road to Centralia and put up Silent Hill: The Ride.

That wasn't the best part... the best part was when he walked into the store and "Dream Police" was on the radio.

If they called it Woohoo the makers of Yoohoo would probably sue them, the way WaWa did to HaHa years ago. Yes, that's mind-bogglingly stupid, but it happened. Personally, I wish Cedar Fair would stick with Voodoo and spend some of our admission money to fight trademark abuse. I don't know what else useful they're doing with it. Certainly not hiring competent food service employees.

They're replacing it with another family coaster. They haven't said what exactly, but on their website it now says NEW Family Coaster - Price TBD. As for the reason it's being removed... A co-worker has a relative who works on the park's maintenance crew. He said that the welders refused to try to weld it anymore.

I have to wonder what seats you rode Steel Force in. Sure it's no Magnum but it certainly has some airtime, particularly in the back seat. Thunderhawk can be dangerous. If you sit in the right seats, the airtime can be violent indeed. And slamming into the brakes is no fun either. (At least after the first ride, you're prepared for that part.) Also, I'm sure you could touch the structure going into the dogleg, not that anyone would do that of course... But I still ride it every time, because I like violent airtime. Did you have any problems with Hydra? Last year every time I rode it it had a terrible vibration problem.

They expanded it this year actually, although I didn't see any extra advertising for it. The first I heard about it was at the PPP closing ceremonies. Besides the Phoenix, Haunted Antique Cars, and Haunted House, the rides were Twister, Haunted Train, and for completely unexplained reasons, Fandango. The hours were 6-10 and prices were $2.50 per ride for everything. I really like the idea of not having to mess with 10-cent tickets. I just wish they hadn't raised Phoenix 25 cents in one year. Hopefully it'll be a few years before it goes up anymore. Robb, I think the high height requirement on HSTC is just to ride it alone, but I can't check because it's already disappeared from everything except the price list. When I rode it at PPP this year, I thought it was smoother than ever. But I can see how the way they operate it would beat the hell out of it. It certainly makes a distinctive noise!

My bottom steel coasters are GASM, Arrow corkscrew, and Mantis -- continuous headbangers all. My bottom wood coasters are Mean Streak and Rolling Thunder, both of which are either completely forceless or continuous jackhammers, depending on what kind of mood they're in.

I wouldn't expect it to be using so much bandwidth that you can't use the web though. I've had problems listening to streaming radio while doing large downloads, but there's an obvious time issue there. Web requests shouldn't time out that easily. Although, that still doesn't mean it might not be on our end. I have no idea whether there's any way to adjust the timeout time. I'm using Internet Explorer 7 on Windows XP Pro SP3 by the way.

While downloading the file last evening (looks great by the way), I was unable to read the forum at the same time. I kept getting timeouts. Is this just coincidence, or do you have some sort of flood-protection on your server or something?

That's the beautiful part of it, it dumps out all the loose stuff from the train before it gets up to speed! I wish Stormrunner could do that before the launch...

reposted from RRC: This ad was found in The Guide News (which is basically an advertising newspaper) of central Pennsylvania. NOTICE Williams Grove Historical Steam Engine Association Inc. #1 Steam Engine Hill Mechanicsburg, PA Consignment Sale Sat. November 22, 2008 @ 8:00 A.M. Tractors -- Ride Cars from Williams Grove Park -- Farm Equipment Case 900 motor rebuilt & restored-Farmall BN restored-Ford 8N-Farmall M tractors; Little Genus 12" 2 bottom-J D cut off & 3 pt. Ferguson 2 bottom plows; J D drag disk; 5' Buch packer; 18 Bumper-10 Whip-2 wooden Roller coaster & 4 Haunted house cars; kids boats; W.G. Fire Co. win a car for $1.00 sign; iron railing; plastic building decorations; 5 Gal. Gulf cans; 3' wide reel mower push type, plus other items. More items expected before sale day. Items accepted Wed. Nov. 19 starting @ 9 A.M. to dusk thru Fri Nov. 21 2008. W.G.H.S.E. Assoc. No household items, auto/truck tires or construction material accepted for sale. All items must be removed by Wed. Nov. 26 2008. No out of state checks without bank letter approval. Sales tax will be collected. Not responsible for any items on sale bill not brought to sale. Not responsible for fire, theft, accident or damage. Auctioneers: Little IKE Eichelberger AU-001954-L & J. Edward Leaman AU-002034-L. Contact: Ken Bowman 717-691-8278 or cell 717-579-5792 Visit web site @ www.wghsea.org

I got it today. I was worried because he's using a Yahoo address and I've had Yahoo mail go missing before.

I submitted my wood and steel ballots on Sunday evening. Six hours later I got confirmation for my wood ballot, but I never got anything about the steel one. Should I be worried?

One on IE7, Windows Safari, and Google Chrome. Three on Mozilla. Yeah, that's right, Mozilla 1.7.13 circa 2006. I never upgraded to Firefox.

I just got the ad. Tickets are $2.50 each or $10 for 5.

I wish I knew. It does get pretty expensive since Phoenix is so re-rideable and the line is usually short. But I would imagine they'd still charge by individual ride since part of the money is donated to the fire company.

We skipped the haunted cars again in hopes of getting there one of the other nights. The line ran from the queue all the way over to Phoenix's entrance for a while! You could see from the double-down that there were scenes along the entire length of the track again, even though they moved the mini-coaster out front this year. Twister has really improved the last two years, hasn't it? I got tired of waiting for the first car and rode in the 2nd car, and it was smoother than the first one. It used to be that the front and back were the only sane seats on it!

3 PM, I met my girlfriend at her job and we headed to Knoebels. Since it was mid-afternoon, there were more people heading out of the craft show than into it so the traffic between Elysburg and the park, where it usually comes to a standstill, was moving at normal speed. We ended up not parking all the way at the back of the parking lot, which was surprising. It was a little after 4 when we got to the handstamp office, where there was no line either. After we got our handstamps, we headed to Cesaris to get our free pizza. Along the way, we spotted a lot of people with PPP shirts and lots of insignia from other parks. This was a big step up from last year when even though there was a record crowd it was hard to tell who were enthusiasts and who weren't. Even though there wasn't much of a line yet for pizza, service was still terribly slow. And despite the wait, our pizza wasn't terribly hot. But at least it didn't burn our mouths, and at least it was well-cooked unlike some years when the PPP rush hits. After the za, we went to the bumper cars to use up some leftover tickets before PPP started. There was a short line, and we got an average ride. Then we headed over to the Phlyers. There was about a 2-cycle wait. On the first cycle, somebody we couldn't see from the back of the queue got a really loud snap, and the op immediately turned the speed way down. The next ride he started out at full speed, but as soon as somebody got what I consider an average snap, he turned it down again. I've snapped with this guy running before, but obviously that wasn't going to happen today. And with the crosswind, you can't help snapping. So even though we were at the front of the line by then, we bailed out and headed back to the bumper cars. We got there just in time for the last ride before they shut down for the 5:00 break, and I got a car that had severe drive train issues if you turned it hard to the left. Of course, you've got to turn it hard to the left... So with everything shut down for supper break, and our pizza already out of the way, we went to the swap meet to check out the peep contest. There were only 3 entries, and it was really no contest. We both voted for the same one. We spent a little time looking at the park memorabilia, but it's pretty much the same year after year, so we sat down to wait for Phoenix to open. 6:00, Phoenix opened, we got one ride and then went to Twister to let the Phoenix line settle down. There wasn't much of a crowd at Twister, so we took two rides in a row. There had obviously been some wood replaced recently on the helix, and it was running really smoothly. The same couldn't be said for their Halloween efforts. There were hardly any decorations and only one stunt, which was alternately failing to activate and staying stuck on as people walked by. Next we went back to the Phlyers. This time they had changed ops, and everybody was phlying as good as I've ever seen them. We had such a good ride that we got right back in line for another one. After that it was back to the bumper cars for another ride. It was almost all adults this time and there were lots of hard hits. Then we went over to the High Speed Thrill Coaster for our yearly ride. It was almost all adults too, and it was running as good as ever. We rode in the back and got slammed around as good as on the rides we had just left. Nobody was keeping their hands up! Finally we went back to Phoenix to finish out the night. The tunnel was well-decorated although some of their lighting effects only triggered once the whole time we were there. (Maybe too much smoke?) For those of you who have been to PPP, you know what goes on in the front-seat queue. Last year it wasn't happening as much, but this year it was back with a vengeance. Maybe it got a little too rowdy, because sometime after 9 the last op, who we had never seen before, told people to stop it. It stopped for about one train, and he never said anything again. Towards the end, Backseat Bill Galvin finally showed up after hanging around the sale tables all day. He had changed into a Thor costume, complete with red hair and lightning bolts, but carrying a rocket instead of a hammer, and was carrying on with an anti-Astroland routine. "LESS COASTERS! MORE CONDOS!". I guess you had to be there. I should've shot a video. 10:00 comes and they're still letting people in. About 10:10 they finally close the line. After a couple of trains only seats 1-3 and 10-12 have people waiting, and the ops tell everyone to fill up the train. Cool, I thought, I finally catch the last train on Phoenix at PPP! But the ride itself was a let-down, partly because I had a faster ride earlier during a rain shower, partly because I wasn't in my preferred seat, but mostly because despite everyone cheering for a re-ride, there wasn't one. So after unceremoniously getting off of Phoenix, we went to Phoenix Junction to see the winners of the costume parade (which we had skipped to take advantage of the shorter Phoenix lines) and see what Dick had to say about the state of the park, especially of course the Howard Hughes Memorial Sculpture Garden (which had been nicely lit for the evening, but wasn't displaying any movement). Surprisingly, he said that they had made some major progress in the last week since the park had closed and he was reasonably confident that the Flying Turns would be open next spring. Further unexpected news was that the haunted ride nights, the next three Saturdays from 6-10PM, were being expanded to include not just Phoenix, the Haunted House, and the Haunted Antique Cars, but the Haunted Pioneer Train, Twister, and Fandango. Why Fandango? I have no idea. We also had no idea that the train was haunted this year because it wasn't in the PPP brochure, although we wondered why it wasn't running before dark when we went for our Twister rides shortly after 6. It's also ironic that they open Twister this year with hardly any decorations vs. the years prior to last year when the station was heavily decorated. The costume contest anouncements were anti-climactic. Half of the winners didn't show up for their prizes. Also there seemed to be very little intersection between the set of people who took part in the parade and the set of people we saw riding in costume. The biggest surprise of the night was that there were two attendees from Sweden, although there was no prize for that. Total registrants were 1377, down from a record 1600-something last year.

Dick is now reasonably confident that it will be open next spring.

One ridiculously hot day at Dorney, I did see someone soaking his head in the sink. But I doubt a sign would've done any good, because I don't think he spoke English. As for Natasha Bedingfield playing Playland, it's not that unusual, except maybe the free part. Even though she's had a couple of hits, remember that she's just starting out. I've seen some pretty big new bands playing some pretty small colleges here in the middle of nowhere, Pennsylvania. If you got a race on Rolling Thunder, consider yourself lucky. When I was there, they also had 5-minute dispatch times but still didn't manage to race them. And it both sucks and blows -- the one side had no forces at all, the other one had continuous jackhammering.

The musician's name is Dave Parker. Other than that, I know nothing about him. (And yes, Knoebels fans, I AM going to PPP, just not til tonight.)