Tanks4me05

WOW. I was not expecting them to go so gung-ho with this across the board. I'm stunned (in a good way). Even more so that they seem to be including some hypers in there. I'm literally at a loss for words, so... just... wow. They're probably doing it at so many parks because the headsets probably aren't that expensive when compared to the cost of an entire roller coaster. Never having been a part of their design/business team to do price evaluations, I probably wouldn't put an out-of-my-butt price tag of more than maybe $2,000 per headset. So fully outfitting all those coasters will only end up at around $1 million, which is basically a kiddie coaster's worth of money. No pun intended? What kind of monster are you??????

Sorry for the double post, but it's necessary to bump the thread. I'm still doing the trip, but unfortunately money is tight, so I won't be able to afford many front line passes. Therefore, I'm asking for recommendations on how to prioritize the parks. (I already have gone to CP and CW before, so they aren't as necessary despite their size.)

^Pro tip: Once you finish all your gen eds, drop it down to 12 credits per semester if you're serious. It's more money, and it takes more time, but what people don't tell you is how much work it really is; I'm in my last semester before I get my BSME, and I've averaged about 7 hours of studying, homework and note-taking for every credit hour of engineering class. Completing an engineering degree in four years is ridiculous, something which nearly all of your PROFESSORS will agree with, because that means (in my experience) literally 120 hours of school work per week. Right now I'm pulling only about 80, which although means I have zero free time, at least I get a decent night of sleep most of the time. The psychological price you'll pay otherwise just isn't worth it. If, however, you end up being one of those people that can somehow manage a four year degree, I envy you, but after what I've gone through I do not recommend taking the chance.

^^Technically, that's correct, because you have to get your degree in engineering before you design anything, because it's the engineers that do the designing, but there's a few technicalities that would make your statement invalid under certain circumstances; you appear to be implying that you must be an engineer and have a job in a different industry before making coasters. While that definitely helps your resume in terms of experience, you can also get incredibly lucky and land your first job at a ride design firm, and you can also do some light work if you get an engineering internship with one of them. To design rides/rollercoaster, you don't need to know math. You need imagination. It's the mathematical calculations and the engineer part that requires the math. But it's the engineers that do the designing. It's practically the definition of an engineer. You need to know the math in order to make the rides safe (which is always the number one priority) but you need the imagination in order to create something that the industry hasn't seen before. You are correct in the sense that anyone with enough imagination can come up with the ideas for rides, but the whole point of the amusement industry is to design and sell rides that work and are safe, which requires an engineering degree.

That's not strictly a Valravn question, so that might not have been asked. Either way, since that's a more general engineering question, I'm pretty confident that this is primarily to work the supports (or more specifically the footers) around existing rides/infrastructure in the park. If you look at the pictures above this current post, you see that Perimeter Road goes right next to that big lift hill support, and the dorms are on the other side of the road. Angling the support would put the footer directly in one of those areas, so straight down seems to be the easiest option.

Holy crap that's a long trip. From my experiences, you can do one day at Carowinds (big park but surprisingly short lines), two days at Cedar Point, one day at Kings Dominion (again, surprisingly short lines) and one day at Hersheypark. If you get the gold flash pass, you can manage one day at Six Flags Great Adventure without much issue. Though I have yet to visit Kings Island myself, I've heard in some places that it can actually be doable in one day, but that's safest to do with a fast lane Plus. Also, it seems to be your route is kind of inefficient by ending at New York City because you're going south to Williamsburg and all the way back north, though honestly I don't feel like putting in that effort to validate my claim. Assuming you haven't booked hotels and bought tickets, and assuming that you want to and are able to keep the trip at 29 days, I'd recommend: Day 1: Fly to Orlando Day 2: Busch Gardens Tampa Day 3: Sea World Orlando I highly recommend to do both Fun Spot parks in Orlando and Kissimmee (the former has better coasters, the latter has the world's largest skycoaster) either of these days. Day 4: Drive to Charlotte Day 5: Carowinds Day 6: Dollywood Day 7: Drive to Beech Bend (Bowling Green, Kentucky) in the morning, visit the park in the afternoon and then drive to Santa Claus, Indiana at night. Day 8: Holiday World Day 9: Kentucky Kingdom Day 10: Kings Island with Fast Lane Plus, get a hotel somewhere in Columbus, Ohio for the night (about the halfway point-ish from Kings Island to Cedar Point) to split up the drive. Day 11: Cedar Point Day 12: Cedar Point Day 13: Waldameer, drive to Buffalo, New York Day 14: Darien Lake Day 15: Canada's Wonderland Day 16: Drive to Montreal, and either do stuff in the city or go to La Ronde for the evening. Day 17: La Ronde for a full day Day 18: Great Escape Day 19: Six Flags New England Day 20: Quassy Amusement Park in the morning for a couple of hours, Lake Compounce in the evening Day 21: New York City Day 22: Six Flags Great Adventure with Gold Flash Pass. Day 23: Knoebels Day 24: Kennywood Day 25: Hersheypark Day 26: Six Flags America Day 27: Kings Dominion Day 28: Busch Gardens Williamsburg Day 29: Fly out of somewhere between Williamsburg, Virginia and Richmond, Virginia. For my own trip, I chose hotels that were roughly halfway-ish between destinations so I wouldn't have to drive super late at night or super early in the morning. That's something that I would recommend you to consider. Also, I really like driving. Anyone else feel free to make suggestions to my alternative as well. I promise I won't throw my computer across the room in rage if someone comments that my way isn't the best method.

^I dunno about that. Iron deficiency is the world's most common nutritional deficiency, you know.

Looks like a 3 dimensional roller support. This was likely done to both allow for more flexing (and maybe thermal expansion) and so that the bolts wouldn't have to resist any moments, thus requiring way fewer bolts at that connection. I can't say that with complete confidence, though; there was only enough time to cover axial and shear resisting bolted connections in Steel Design last semester.

This is the only thing I disagree with. While I totally understand where you are coming from about not buying them until you get to the park to see how bad the crowds are, what happens when you get to a park and the crowds are insane and the front of the line pass has sold out? I have seen this happen to a number of people and that's the worst case scenario. IMO, the BEST case scenario is when you have spent the money on the front of the line pass you and you end up not using it. Is that a waste of money? Perhaps. But I also look at front of the line passes as "insurance policies." Something that you might not need, but dammit, you'll be VERY happy you have it when you do. That being said, there has never been a time when I have pre-purchased a front of the line pass and didn't end up using it to some capacity. Even when lines are only 20 minutes at a park, those pockets of 20 minutes add up when your front of the line pass turns 20 minutes into 0-5 minutes. If you do 10 rides that day, you've just saved yourself a good couple of hours. That time could be used to have a more relaxing, less stressful day. Get in more rides. Or perhaps leave earlier if you're on a road trip to get to a hotel to get a better nights sleep. I place value on every one of those things and if the front of the line pass allows me to do those things, then it's well worth it. When someone is coming from a far away place like England, there is NO WAY I would say "not recommended to buy these until after entering the park and seeing how bad the crowds are" because I have watched people get to Kings Island, for example, only to have the Fast Lane Plus sold out and then they stood in line two hours for rides like Banshee & Nighthawk. Complete waste of time, IMO, when their wait could have been close to zero. Just my thoughts on the matter... Fair enough. I admit that I'm still coming from a domestic trip mindset and am looking at it from a sort of a "diminishing returns" standpoint.

I have a 22 day Texas/Midwest US trip that I'm going on next July. It's ending up to be $3,212 USD (2158.24 GBP because you live in London) for the whole thing, which equates to $146 USD / 98.1 GBP per day. Here are all the constraints I placed on my spending: -Chain-wide (IE Cedar Fair and Six Flags) season/meal passes if they are more economical -The cheapest hotels on Hotwire.com that had free breakfast and an approval rating of above 70% (I found this to be the cheapest hotel booking website after looking at probably a dozen different ones) -$30 USD / 20.16 GBP per day for food (I typically only eat two meals per day and that's why I selected free breakfasts -Assume no front line passes; not recommended to buy these until after entering the park and seeing how bad the crowds are that particular day. -No souvenirs; I don't care for that sort of thing. -Making a round trip loop via car to avoid flight tickets and car rentals. Looks like you won't be able to avoid these seeing as it sounds like you want to do mainland Europe. I admittedly have yet to travel to Europe so you know the mass transit system better than I do and how to use that to your advantage. That being said, the US is generally quite a bit cheaper than Europe.

^^Huh. I stand corrected, then.

I count 8. Here is the layout as I saw it, with inversions in bold. - Indoor drop. - Vertical launch - End of the launch - Outside banked turn - Heartline roll - ~130° drop - Dive loop - First MCBR - Twisted drop - Overbanked turn - Zero-g roll - Outward top-hat - Dive-loop - Second MCBR - +90 Drop - Inside top-hat - Outward top-hat - Dive loop - MCBR - Twisted drop - Pop of air - Overbank - Pop of air - Overbank turn - Large corkscrew I'm still amazed about the variety of elements that the layout offers. I also count approx. 12 airtime moments. Slight correction: After sticking a ruler directly to my computer screen to measure the height versus the length of train's (perfectly straight) underside at 2:14 and taking the arctangent of the ratio of the two, I got about a 115 degree drop. It wasn't a perfect profile shot, so it's probably going to be a little steeper than that, but I don't think it will quite be a record breaker like that; it might take the steepest drop on the continent title away from Cannibal, though. [/nerd]

^I immediately thought of easier construction (my first thought was at minimizing welds) which is certainly a big enough advantage, but I was wondering if there was anything less obvious. I'm surprised that it holds up so well for minimizing footers, because I'd assume that a greater track height to width ratio would be best to increase its moment of inertia. The inside of the box is probably a lot beefier than what I'm expecting.

I see that Robb's at the RMC booth based on the latest Twitter update. Those who are there to hear what the guys at RMC are saying about it: What are the advantages that the T-Rex track has compared to other steel coasters (other than aesthetics)? PS: Does anyone else think that GG should make a battlebot of that saw blade train and enter it into the next competition?

Feel free to ask for further clarification or simplification, because trying to summarize literally tens of thousands of pages of engineering textbooks into just a couple of paragraphs is almost as hard as trying to learn it all in the first place. 1: A full speed test would have to happen all the time as per the restrictions on the type of coasters you mentioned, because the only power for pretty much the whole ride would be gravity. The E-stop sections would be needed to be tested at various stages in order to make sure the brakes, electronics, etc. would work but a lot of the time, blocks aren't designed to accelerate the ride back all the way up to full speed after an E-stop because it would be unnecessarily expensive to buy motors, etc. powerful enough to do that job but only be used on rare occasions; therefore, there's an increased risk of the train to valley somewhere later in the course, and that needs to be tested. (EDIT: This is assuming that they are using a constant speed motor for the lift; if the motor the design firm chose can vary its speed, then they will test it under various speed scenarios.) As for the speed of brand new rides, it's because new wheels need to get broken in, like many other components. Once they get used, they wear themselves down, which creates a gap just big enough so that they eventually run normally. When individual wheels need to be replaced in the future, this happens again once you put the new wheels in place; on some coasters, if you replace all the wheels at once, there's a dramatically increased risk of the ride stalling somewhere. Also affecting a ride after it's been broken in is the ambient temperature; Once the coaster has been sitting in the cold overnight, the wheel lubricants thicken quite a bit. So when the ride first starts up in the morning, the oil can behave closer to something like peanut butter, thus slowing down the train a lot, but by midday or afternoon, the train has run enough times on the track that the heat transferred into the wheels from the friction they normally encounter (as well as atmospheric heating) will then make the lubricants less viscous so that it runs at full speed. 2: To give a more accurate response, I would require employment by an amusement ride firm, because there are a ton of factors that come into play and it's probably highly different for each situation. The major factors that jump out at me after thinking for a few minutes, however, are that you have the amount of supports, the track itself, however many crossovers you might have, how many footers you have, however many support and track connections you have, how much construction equipment and how many construction workers can physically occupy the space at one time, and then whenever bad weather strikes that will hold you up no matter what stage you are at. You might have a ton of existing underground infrastructure you have to worry about so that could dramatically slow down digging. (I would also expect on occasion a ride manufacturer to deal with a situation where they knew very little about what was beneath them which would cause them to dig super carefully.) You might have local labor and/or zoning laws requiring workers to work at specified times for a specified duration, which those laws could vary from job to job (so it could theoretically affect the local steel construction companies more so than the foundation layers.) And then you have horrible or great weather at any phase of construction, and it will affect that part of the ride's progress accordingly. I can all but guarantee that I only barely started to cover the main subjects, though. 3: That would be largely a combination of marketing as well as legal reasons, for company X might have intellectual property rights to element name Y, much like how copyrights and trademarks might work elsewhere. 4: The equation for centripetal acceleration over a level turn is a = (v^2)/r, where v is the velocity of the object, and r is the radius of the turn it's currently navigating. That means, if you double the velocity, the turn has to be made four times wider in order to keep the G’s the same. With coasters, gravity comes into play, because you often aren’t level for a lot of the ride. As gravity pulls you downward, the train gets faster, so in order to keep the G’s the same, the radius of the track has to continually widen accordingly. However, the track is typically designed according to the center of gravity of the train, because the whole train, no matter how long or short it is, travels all at the same speed, as if it were an infinitely small point located at its center of gravity, which is usually quite close to the middle of the train. So, let’s say the radius of the track at the very top of the hill is designed to produce -0.5 G’s while the middle of the train goes over that point at 30 mph. By the time the center of the train is halfway down the drop, the track at that point was designed to still keep -0.5 G’s of floater air for the center of the train now that it’s traveling 45 mph. But now the back seat is traveling 45 mph as well, over a point of the track that was designed to generate -0.5 G’s at 30 mph, so now the back of the train is experiencing hard core ejector air at -1.5 G’s. The longer the train is, the more difficult it is to control the G’s on either end of the train, which is why only short, low capacity trains are the only ones that ever break the steepness records anymore. If you are angled at less than 90 degrees, gravity is pushing the train towards the track, but more than 90 degrees means the train is pulled away from the track via gravity, making the airtime that much harder to control because the G’s will change that much more quickly; with a two row train on a Eurofighter, there is very little difference in the G’s between the front and back row since they are almost already at the center of gravity, as opposed to the 16 row trains on Ride of Steel or those insanely long trains on the Zierer family coasters (where on the Tivoli large coasters, if you sit in the front seat, you get the really weird feeling of accelerating up a hill due to gravity because the train is so long compared to the hill it’s traversing.) If I missed anything, it's because it's both getting late and I've been a slave of my French Press for the last few weeks, which will only get worse until I finish my finals.

Yay! That's my photo! Anyway, as pretty as it was, it was definitely not an enjoyable experience. The layout wasn't really intense, but it was really rough, and probably the worst part was the seat design; the "padding" didn't stretch the entire width of the seat, so when I slid off it and slammed back onto it thanks to the rough ride it made it significantly worse of an experience for my back. Also, the OTSR's (which I suspect may be unnecessary for this non-inverting ride) were rock hard, which meant really bad headbanging. If you want to go on it, go ahead, just don't have high hopes for it.

^ and ^^: I'll admit that I was kind of stumped until the most recent photo update as well, but I'm fairly confident I figured it out and it's actually really simple. I encourage you to watch the NL2 video again, which I will post a link to below for reference: From 0:38 to 0:39, the train traverses a straight section right after the first drop and next to the station. At first it looked like the station was 10 - 15 feet higher than the straight section, but upon closer inspection it appears to be at the same height, which is crucial to making it a much simpler design. In the second to last photo of MrLittle's recent TR, you can easily see a track switch similar to what is commonly used for adding or removing trains to tracks, or coasters with dual loading stations; this is likely at the very end of the straight section and directly behind the station. What I suspect is that the straight section is actually a brake run, which will stop the train as it travels backwards through it or after it will valley by going backwards up the first drop a bit. The train will then stop behind the switching track, which will then switch, and the brakes will release the train to allow it to go forwards again and then over the track switch where it will now go left to enter the station through the back end.

^^Whatever you do, though, do not skip Kozmo's Kurves if/when you ever go to Knoebels. That tiny monster seriously holds its own against full size rides, and I legitimately put it on par with something like Ride of Steel. And better yet, adults can ride alone. I do keep track of all the coasters I've been on. Also, I count Disk'O's, powered coasters, Larson ring of fire/super loops, dark rides with gravity drops, and Intamin 1st Gen Free Falls as credits, but that's because there's no standardized definition of a coaster, so those fit my personal definition of a coaster. But that's really only because I like numbers, and I primarily ride the above because they are fun. If I'm going to a park for the first time and they have kiddie coasters that don't have height restrictions, I will go on it once because I might as well, and I do legitimately have fun because many kiddie coaster actually have pretty good laterals. (I probably won't on re-visits though.) But if there's a height max, it's not even close to worth my time to bribe a random kid. Now, when it comes to planning trips, I might occasionally add in a small park or FEC that has a smallish coaster I haven't been on, but my primary reason for that is because that small park would break up the otherwise grueling drive between two parks of greater interest, and I treat it as a much better alternative to a traditional rest stop. For example, when I eventually will do a Rocky Mountain/Pacific Northwest trip, I'll stop at Calaway Park (all they have is an Arrow Corkscrew) between Vancouver Playland and Galaxyland because it would break up the otherwise ridiculous 12.5 hour drive. So, although I certainly do some things that some might consider me a CreHo, but I don't really consider myself one because that's usually at the bottom of my priority list on a trip, and I really do ride for fun.

^Interactive dark ride/digital experience and a new coaster for CP? I know this is technically the incorrect thread to be discussing it, but wouldn't that essentially confirm Valravn is going to be a VR coaster?

I'm on Reddit constantly, and the quality of the mods, particularly in the smaller to moderate sized subs (not the primary ones) is much higher. Though this is pretty strongly correlated with how many people post there, it's not always the case. For example, I'm subscribed to /r/guns, which is closing in on a quarter of a million subscribers, so it's pretty big and has notoriety, though nothing like the primary money makers like /r/funny. Yet, it seems to deliver good content and discussions for the most part. I suspect you're not exactly enthusiastic on the subject matter, but I nonetheless encourage you to check it out for a while, because I follow it a lot and think that it's a good example of how a sub can be of a pretty big size yet still maintain its integrity. However, I did not vote in the poll because I am ultimately ambiguous. I see the potential for a big increase of viewership, but Reddit is more similar to the forum (therefore more redundant) than the forum is compared to your Youtube, Facebook and Twitter pages. Therefore, Reddit's popularity combined with its format could turn it into a bit of a double edged sword, where there may be a risk of people leaving here.

As a gift for getting my degree in Mechanical Engineering next year, next July I'm doing an insane 22 day trip, starting and ending at my home in the Syracuse, NY area. I will be covering the following: -Canada's Wonderland -Cedar Point -Indiana Beach -Six Flags Great America -Six Flags St. Louis -Silver Dollar City -Frontier City -Zero Gravity (Dallas) -Six Flags Over Texas -Schlitterbahn New Braunfels -ZDT's Amusement Park -Sea World San Antonio (might visit the Riverwalk in the evening if I get bored.) -Six Flags Fiesta Texas -Schlitterbahn Galveston Island -Galveston Island Historic Pleasure Pier -Kemah Boardwalk -Magic Springs & Crystal Falls -Beech Bend -Holiday World -Kentucky Kingdom -Kings Island -Waldameer Of these, I've only visited CW, CP and Waldameer so far, and I haven't visited those since 2008/2009. Hotwire only books hotels 10 months in advance, so I won't know the exact distances until early September. But when I "pretended" to book hotels earlier to get a good estimate on how much driving and lodging prices, it ended up being around 4,900 miles, and that will probably be within 5% of the actual trip values as the hotels usually aren't very far off the general route.

Really nice pictures! It appears that I'm one of the very few people who actually thoroughly enjoyed Shockwave; the entry to the helix was kinda punchy but that was about it. Granted, I made sure not to choose a row directly above a set of wheels, but still.

Well, I'm officially doing this trip; I'll get another membership for Club TPR in August to see the discounts (though I know that will change, it'll give me a good idea), I'll book the hotels via Hotwire in September (because they book up to 10 months in advance) and I'll get the 2016 tickets and season passes when they become available. I read up on someone who posted a topic in this sub-forum about advice on a Texas trip, and someone mentioned I-35 has horrendous construction traffic. I knew traffic would be an issue, but I neglected it until now because of how impractical it would be to plan accordingly given how unpredictable it can be. So can anyone tell me if the default Google Earth routes are a bad idea or not? What would be good alternatives if they are? (The hotels obviously aren't fixed yet, so I'm neglecting them for now.) CW - CP: ON-401 W, going through Detroit and Toledo. CP - IB: US 24 W IB - SFGAM: I-65 N and I-294 N (luckily I don't actually have to drive through Gary) SFGAM - SFSTL: I-55 S SFSTL - WoF: I-70 W WoF - SDC: MO-13 S SDC - Frontier City: I-44 Frontier City - Zero Gravity: I-35 S Zero Gravity - SFOT: TX-183 W SFOT - Schlitterbahn New Braunfels: I-35 S, or TX-317 S to I-35 S Schlitterbahn New Braunfels to ZDT's: TX-46 E ZDT's to SWSA: I-10 W SWSA to SFFT: TX-1604 Loop/Charles Williams Anderson Loop/W Loop 1604 N SFFT to Schlitterbahn Galveston: I-10 E Schlitterbahn Galveston to Galveston Pleasure Pier: Seawall Blvd Galveston Pleasure Pier to Kemah: I-45 N and TX-146 N Kemah to Magic Springs: US-59 N Magic Springs to Beech Bend: I-40 E Beech Bend to HW: KY-9007 N and US-231 N HW to KK: I-64 E KK to KI: I-71 N KI to Waldameer: I-71 N

I think I might have figured out the reason for this, including all of their other odd shaping issues: Arrow kept on making their coasters using hand calculations for way too long. If you notice, all of their loops and corkscrews are the same size. The geometry to make a loop or a corkscrew is ridiculously complex. Trying to redo the calculations for loops for different coasters of different heights would take up way too much time, so in order to save a huge amount of effort, the inversions were made the same size. In order to keep the G's safe/the same, the speeds at which the coasters have to enter the inversions have to be the same. This is probably why Viper at SFMM has that massive incline before the loop (they wanted a loop at the beginning of the gigantic first drop) as well as why their MCBR's typically slow the trains to a crawl, in order to navigate the corkscrews safely. By the early-to-mid 1980's, CAD programs started to really take off and become cost effective/commonplace in more and more engineering firms. In the amusement design industry, this enabled the design of insanely complex shapes, such as including heartlining into coasters (seen by Giovanola and Intamin in the second half of the 1980's.) Since they have been so successful with their method of designing stuff for so long, they didn't see the need to learn a complicated CAD program. Throughout this decade, Arrow was mostly the king of big coasters and kept making lots of stuff, so this further cemented that their design ideologies didn't need changing. By the 1990's, most companies seemed to start using CAD programs, enabling them to make ridiculously insane stuff, like the advent of B&M's Invert, which is still a world class design to this day. But again, Arrow is still stuck in their old ways. Take a look at Anaconda. If B&M was contracted to make it, the loop and the sidewinder would likely have started sloping upwards from lake level instead of having that big flat incline, the transition between those two helices would have been perfectly smooth, and the MCBR would not have slowed the train to a crawl because all of the geometry of the subsequent track again could have been made much more quickly. But instead, Arrow kept with their old ways, because it worked for them for 20+ years. However, as we all know, the frequency of their new designs really started to plummet in the 1990's now that B&M (et al) started to make ridiculous, new and advanced products all over the place. By the middle of the decade, they noticed how their business was really suffering, and finally realized that they had to try to keep up with the times. It looks like that Roadrunner Express (SFFT) was their first coaster using CAD programs, but they lost a ton of money because they stagnated for two decades while everyone else kept surging forward. While with this new technology they theoretically could have survived if they kept coming up with LOTS of new, innovative ideas, but obviously they did not. X was their last ditch effort to stay afloat, and then of course the final nails in the coffin leading to them being bought out by S&S was the Six Flags lawsuit.

With the looks of it, I'm fairly confident that the reason for those supports on top of Cornball Express are for Cornball Express itself. To really understand the reasons behind it would require knowledge of junior and senior level Structural Engineering courses, but the best summary I can give is as follows: It looks like that the same picnic pavilion they wanted to put Tig'rr over also gave CCI problems when they were designing Cornball Express. I can't tell for sure from the picture (I also have yet to visit myself, but I finally will next year as part of a 3 week college graduation trip) but it looks like the park had that hill that goes right next to Tig'rr also go over the picnic pavilion; since they didn't want to eat into the pavilion and take away picnic seats given the cramped park, they had to build a bit of a bridge over the picnic pavilion instead of having supports go all the way down through. The big I-Beams you see spanning over the picnic pavilion are likely too small to hold that hill and a fully loaded train without bending downward so much that it would collapse if they were just cantilevered out over the pavilion. So in order to prop up the far end from falling into the lake, they added those supports above the bottom of the hill because that is the only place they had the room for it. It doesn't appear to actually support the track directly under itself, as by looking at Picture 31 of your TR, the bottom of the hill seems to be adequately supported by the footers and such that go right into the lake.