Acero

I'm really wondering who bought the GIB. It'll be really interesting to see where those ride(s) end up.

I think Maurer Sohne has the restraint thing totally down. Those lap bars use less material than any other lap restraint (since they're attatched to the side of the seat rather than being a TBar) but are some of the most comfortable. Anyways, someone on the last page mentioned that they could've sworn they'd been on a B&M that had interlocking seatbelts. I think Nitro is one of the only B&M hypers that has had the seatbelts. To my knowledge. And yeah, naturally CW is going to add more queue. It's the only thing that will work. 45 minute wait for a B&M hyper, in a park that services the GTA, in peak season ... I think not.

Sleigh Ride - Relient K

Apparently, black outs for people with a slightly lower gforce tolerance threshold are perfectly (well, maybe not perfectly), but reasonably normal and not detrimental to health. I believe it can occur in the helix spiral.

Ah. I did read that somewhere. That's correct. Were those seatbelts referred to as "interlocking"? That's what these seatbelts are listed as, so they maybe won't hurt the capacity as much as Intamin style seatbelts.

I think it's safe to say [that the rest also do]. But I couldn't tell you WHY the seatbelts were added. B&M has no rep for deaths or accidents related to restraints. Intamin, however, does. Heck, Intamin trains that had T restraints AND seatbelts got somebody ejected. B&Ms clamshells alone have never done that. It's most likely Cedar Fair being safety freaks and requesting the installation of seat belts.

Absolutely. This is the one thing I love about Nitro (can't really speak for the other hypers) is how all you do is pull down the restraint and you're good to go. Seatbelts are a pain, and when there are empty seats then the ride ops have to buckle them and they just really create so much unnecessary time. But it shouldn't decrease the throughput too much. And yeah, a 45 minute line is just plain stupid on the part of CW.

Do you know exactly why interest in the ride diminshed? Costs?

This is really interesting. Appears quite fun too. You sure do have a library of these rollercoaster related tid-bits (the ads, Opryland, this, there's others too). The coaster in the picture I'm assuming is the prototype at a factory? Well, it's too bad not many of these were built. They don't look painful at least, maybe not offering the most amazing thrill, but they certainly look like they could have packed a punch. Looks like this is where the pipeline coaster for RCT comes from. And didn't INTAMIN offer their own version of this ride too?

I'm sure that other operators besides CF would've loved to get their paws on a gem like Geauga Lake. Of course, like previously stated, once the park belonged to Cedar Fair it was obvious it would never make it out of the company's clutch "alive" so to speak. So, there is no shortage of buyers for GL. I will agree with you on the negligence of the park. Like I said, Geauga Lake was a gem in terms of property (and location) that had so much potential for future expansion and not necessarily land expansion but expansion inside the park's boundaries to make it more pleasing to the GP. It's so sad. Geauga Lake was a great park, and could've been an even better park hadn't it been for the recent operators. Six Flags and Cedar Fair are both equally at fault here, although Cedar Fair had the final decision here, the demolition of the park wasn't inevitable. Anyways.

Hhaha. That's funny. Yeah but Cedar Fair is just selfish. Completely. The fate of Geauga Lake is kind of is Six Flag's fault though - you know that the only outcome of selling a park to a competitor that has a flagship park down the road can't be good. If Kennywood operated Geauga Lake they would be the best operator Geauga Lake has ever had...(in my eyes)

He means that if Cedar Fair hadn't aquired the property then Six Flags would've done the same thing to Geauga as they did Astroworld - shut it down and move rides to other Six Flags props. However, I don't think that Six Flags would've done the same thing. They could've easily contacted somebody else to take Geauga, but I guess Cedar Fair was their first choice. And Cedar Fair took it, so they didn't need to contact any other possible buyers. One of the reasons Astroworld was demolished is because it seems to be a nice place to stamp urban developments all over, it is very conveniently located (I have yet to see what happens to the Astroworld property, however. The park could still be there if it hadn't been for Kieran Burke). Geauga Lake isn't exactly in a bustling city like Houston, though. Cedar Fair could've easily sold off the park to a company like PARC. So Astroworld and Geauga are two completely different situations, but with the same demise.

That seems to be the case. Parks are probably more interested in other "innovative" B&M varieties like their flyers over their standups. Clearly, building a standup isn't worth it when you can invest in an interesting flyer, invert, floorless or a sitdown. And even B&M knows that their five other types of coasters own the standups any day. Back on topic, I think that B&Ms are the stand-up winners. The TOGOs can be nice at times, but B&Ms are nice all the time.

I heard it was going to be closer to 130 mph, because on another source about this it was reported to have a top speed of 214 (appx 130). But really my question (which I posed in another thread) would be the type of system Maurer Sohne would use to achieve this launch and the time rate of the launch.

Yep. I'm pretty sure they all do it. Obviously Vekoma wasn't thinking about noise reduction when they designed the catch mechanism.

Ugh. When I posted my message I was just thought to myself: watch somebody post a reply mentioning Intamin's bad mechanical rep. Well, my point is that Intamin is known for being able to, on the most part, create reasonably nice and good launches that deliver - there's thirteen of them now and the smaller ones like Speed Monster and Kanonen don't break down as much as Ka. And to my knowledge Hydraulic launches aren't that power hungry compared to LIMs, and this is what I was getting at because Maurer Sohne doesn't have any system for launching besides the LSM/LIM system. So a 133 mph launch using LIM...wow. That's a lot of power. Well anyways, I personally hope that this rumor is true because it'd be interesting to see what Maurer can come up with.

What a rip-off for the Ka record - beating it by just a mere five miles per hour. I think this coaster will probably be even less thrilling than Kingda Ka or Dragster since the coaster looks pretty flat by the website's layout overview. And, I'm surprise they've used Maurer Sohne for this, they don't really have a big record of launch coasters (they've only built one), unlike Intamin.

139,589 for my third try. but i have to say some of these are quite random. especially the darien lake one. i would love it though, if ride of steel was convienently located twenty minutes away from me (rather than eight hours...)

btw, darien lake is NOT in new york city. =] just thought i'd let you know. or maybe you do know, but the quiz certainly doesn't know.

43 rides on Goliath at Six Flags Holland.

Actually, Vampire is one of nicer SLCs out there, and while it is bumpy, your skull is not violently crushed into the restraint during the rollover, like it is in T2 at Kentucky Kingdom, or El Condor.

Kudos to that! Compagnie des Alpes is probably one of the most uninterested and boring theme park operators in the world. They make absolutely no effort to change what they consider already 'good enough,' and have extremely poor guest relations/support. It's actually sad to see the Parc Asterix is so neglected that they don't even receive show upgrades and so forth. The management the operator has installed at the park Walibi World thinks that removing rides and putting on mediocre shows is going to somehow maintain the amount of guests that the park amazingly receives. I'm actually quite jealous of the team at Walibi Belgium, who really put their hearts into maintaining rides AND a decent water park, investing in shows, entertainment, and 'quality' restaurants and keep a real balance between child and thrill attractions (addition of Vertigo in 2006/2007 -- Walibi World's last major attraction was Goliath, which was constructed during the Six Flags Holland era). According to the Walibi World management, keeping a balance is removing thrill rides, closing thrill rides, and installing wastes of space. In fact, Walibi World was the first park to test these new SLC seats, and even though the reaction from the GP was great during the test sequences, they have not shown large interest in purchasing train-fulls of these new seats. Well back on topic, I believe that Vekoma is heading in the right direction with these new seats, obviously, it's just sad it took them, what - 13 years to do so. The pain has been there since the inception of the SLC, and was quite evident, so taking over a decade to redesign such migraine-inducing trains seems quite unreasonable. But hey -- at least they've done it. Now it's up to the parks to invest in the trains (highly reccomended for any SLC-possessing park out there).

Memphis Kiddie Park.