smallpox

New for 2016, Boomerang, the new coaster coming to Kings Dominion! Go forwards and even backwards on a ride you'll never forget. This is the biggest roller coaster the park has recieved since 2010. It will feature what we like to call the Boomerang affect, this great design is made so that you'll feel like someone hit you with a Boomerang, doesn't that sound like fun! marketed as the tallest and fastest looping orange shuttle coaster in the mid-atlantic region!

Kings Dominion: i think ever since CF bought the park, it's generally been very much on the right track. i dont want it to sound like i'm clubbing the park because i'm not, i love it. no park is perfect, though, so here are (in my opinion) their biggest mistakes: 1. The collective sins of the Paramount era. This includes (but is not limited to) - removing much of the park's quirky personality, things like the singing mushrooms, candy apple grove, and almost all other whimsical little flourishes. - theming rides after instantly-forgetten movies like the italian job, tomb raider, days of thunder, etc. - abandoning any pretense that the different sections of the park meant anything. (for example, erecting an Area 51-style military base and a Himalayan boblsed ride in the Congo) - the Hurler 2. Retheming the kids area to Peanuts. I realize this is a CF inevitability, and i am sure there are real solid business reasons it happened, but both my kids (7 and 4) complain about this every time we go. It really pisses off my 7 year old in particular. she's like "remember when that wall used to have Blue from Blues Clues on it? Remember when I met Little Bill? Remember when the Backyardigans were here?? NO KIDS care about Charlie Brown! UGH!!" her words, not mine. (Personally, I still miss Scooby and Yogi and the Hair Bear Bunch, but that gang is probably just as irrelevant as Peanuts to today's kids, so whatever.) 3. The incredible shrinking "Lake" Charles. from this to this

a B&M Hyper would be awesome, for the reasons Ape mentioned. it would be unlike anything else in the park, including i305. so would a big, modern woodie. don't get me wrong, i love grizzly and rebel yell, but they are pretty ancient and small. (hurler should simply be scrapped)

that's not an official KD channel. it's fan-made speculation.

yeah, capacity is very low. it's not just a matter of popularity. and i don't feel like the queue redesign had much of an impact on rider throughput. the only thing that would improve capacity would be a second station, or at least having the ability to let riders exit from one train while another train is loading (like Flight of Fear). but those kind of alterations would probably be cost prohibitive on a 20 year old ride.

can't stress this enough: Ride. Volcano. First. the first coaster you will see and be drawn to is Dominator. walk right past it and proceed to Volcano. Volcano's line is extremely slow and just gets longer and longer as the day goes on. in afternoons, i've seen a 2 hour wait for Volcano while i305 is almost a walk on.

for a while, just before they redesigned the turn, there were trims on the first drop, which did significantly slow down the ride. maybe one of the videos you saw was from that period.

that trim has been there since the ride opened. i rode it on one of the first days it was eperating and the trim was present. it was there before the temporary trims on the drop, before the turn redesign, before the water spritzers on the wheels. the ride is incredible even with that minor slowdown before the last section (trust me those twists dont need to be taken at any higher a speed .

i305 is fantastic in any seat. it maintains such a consistently fast pace throughout the whole course, even at its apexes. this means that none of the seats have g-forces that are all that much different from the rest. certainly you get more air on the first drop in the back row, but in general it hits most of its hills with such velocity that the speed difference over the top of a hill between the front row and back is fairly minimal.

TOGO went out of business 14 years ago.

awesome idea.

this is amazing, thanks for posting! I remember when Diamond Falls was built. Since day one, I always thought the cave at the end was weirdly pointless. And I remember the three huge concrete silos underwater, you walked right by them in line, which must have been part of that reverse-vacuum pump system. Amazing what a piece of crap the whole thing was from an engineering standpoint. Did Intamin even test the design? it sounds like there's no way any of the wheels and other components on those boats could have stood up to normal usage. And it sounds like the design of the trough and lift both had huge and obvious problems -- boats sliding down the lift, and the trough not being anywhere near water tight, to the point that it was draining the lake? crazy! i didn't ride it very often (it was a pretty lackluster ride) but i probably wouldnt have ever ridden it if i knew how much jerry-rigging and re-engineering KD had done just to get boats to go around the dang thing without destroying themselves and the ride. It is also pretty funny guests were volunteering to be completely drenched by stagnant lake slime, hahaha.

Wouldn't that be a little too similar to Volcano? only if B&M decided to cut their normal capacity, length, and reliability in half. a launched B&M invert seems kind of infeasible to me. those invert trains look like they weigh 4 times what the volcano trains weigh.

i haven't ridden every launched coaster on Earth, but it was definitely a far more intense launch than TTD or Kingda Ka. it was a one trick pony, but then so are a lot of launched coasters. from a guest's perspective, it was really just the poor capacity (and downtime) that ruined it. seriously, it made Volcano's line seem fast.

hmm, drive 6.5 hours to wait two hours for Millenium Force, or drive one hour and walk on to i305 ... decisions, decisions ....

Anaconda is usually a walk-on or a 2-3 train wait, unless the park is just swamped.

my two kids (6 and 3) LOVE dinosaurs alive and we go every time. I mean maybe nobody you know goes to Dinosaurs Alive but maybe you're not the target audience. the idea of a huge modern wooden coaster for KD, now that I can get behind.

yes they have a whole "waynes world" area with a Stan Mikita's and other rock n roll stuff. they used to have a stretched customized AMC Gremlin like in the movie, too. it was all de-themed when Cedar Fair took over.

Jack Rabbit, Kennywood, 1920. Unless you count Wild One at SFA, which was once "Giant Coaster" at Paragon Park, originally built in 1917.

When I was there they were even dispatching the left side first to try and compensate, but the right side would still pass it on the lift. Definitely moving quite a bit faster. Seems to this not-mechanically-inclined person like it'd be an easy thing to fix, if they wanted. the right side lift has been slightly faster for as long as i can remember. like maybe even before Paramount. i have no idea why.

the slogan on that car -- "Turning your world around" -- is kind of dark if you think about it. like, isn't it kind of implying the reader is unhappy? sounds like a good tagline for an anti-depressant or a suicide support line ... for a coaster it's a little weird. ride looks fun, though.

I was there Friday and it ran flawlessly all day. They only ran one train. It would have been silly to run two, since there was never more than a 3 or 4 train wait.

what does this mean. what park's lineup isn't average if you take away their two signature rides?

i think some kind of huge modern woodie would be perfect, especially if it replaced Hurler. i love Grizzly, but it has been dealt an awful hand with its entrance back behind the Dinosaurs Alive gift shop, and having its unique "through the woods" feel partially destroyed by Hurler's construction. maybe tearing down Hurler and Grizzly for one mega woodie does make sense (i doubt this would be happening next year though).

I feel like "head to volcano first" should be part of the thread title or something. I wonder how many times that (good) advice has been given over the course of this thread. but yeah - ride volcano first. its line will only get longer and longer throughout the day. i305 is the better ride, but its line stays short because it moves so many more people per hour.