Shavethewhales

Wow, that's the complete opposite from what I experienced earlier this summer. They were going crazy on intimidator telling each and every train that they had like 20 seconds to get buckled in and checked before they sent the train out. There wasn't even a line at times because they were moving people through so quickly that it never had time to build up even with a reasonable crowd in the park that day. I guess there are some days where they are told to hurry, and some days where they aren't. Maybe the supervisor wasn't there that day.

Am I the only one expecting something big in 2016? I have a feeling I'm repeating the same old discussion here, but additions have been pretty lax since 2009 (adding windseeker last year can't count for much expenditure-wise since it was recycled from Knott's). They have plenty of busy days, and I know Halloween is absolutely packed out every weekend. I think they've been saving up for something - but in any case they are certainly "due" for another big ticket ride. Not saying it'll be a coaster, but I expect something on the level of a screamin swing or disko coaster.

It looks very similar to what I expect RCTW will look like when it is completely re-hashed. I'm sure Atari is well aware of this, especially after the freak out. It will be interesting to see which turns out better... I expect a lot of careful attention will be given to things people speak up about, so keep making useful, thoughtful suggestions to both companies! There's never been a better time for fans of this game genre to get exactly what they want! As others have stated, it doesn't need to be realistic per se, but for enthusiasts to get into it, most of the coasters and rides need to be at least based on actual designs. It looks like they are most of the way there, though the track spine on that B&M speed coaster is rounded instead of boxed. It wouldn't surprise me if they just have "steel coaster track" with different types of cars based on real world designs. Same issue with RCTW. Custom scenery is easy to handle for the rest, assuming of course that they make it possible to implement.

I doubt that you really saw Manby. Besides the obvious SEA corp thing, I don't think high-powered CEO's typically do personal site visits like that. I could be wrong, but I doubt it. SeaWorld Corp. has it's own basket of issues that require massive investments, so there's no reason why they would be considering DL. I don't know if it holds any water, but one of the thoughts behind Manby's departure from HFEC is that he was frustrated about being held back from growing the company even more than he was. HFEC makes a lot of investments, but they follow a pretty clear, thoughtful process and don't take too many risks. The few times they have, they've been burned. They were snooping around for more parks to add to their chain at various points in the last decade, and we do know that they were very interested in DL, but a lot has changed and now they are investing a buttload of money into DW and they still don't have an official CEO to replace Manby yet. The next CEO could swing the company back into being more conservative and focusing on their core parks. My hope for them to take the park back has waned, though it is still not completely impossible. I don't know why I want them to get this park, except that I know they could rebuild it into something cool and it might add some power to the chain. I haven't kept up with Parques Reinudos (sp?) lately, but is there any reason to believe that they would be in contention? They still own Lake Compounce, right?

They still have people at the entrances of the big rides who tell people to get lockers if they are carrying bags. As far as the video is concerned, keep in mind that it was made by a fan who has no real idea about what RMC's philosophy is or how they work with their customers. He does pull in a few likely tropes that RMC would theoretically include in an I-box conversion, but RMC would of course have a much more polished flow through the ride. I think this particular youtuber puts way too many inversions in his creations, for one thing. Like I said earlier though, why not push the idea of simply adding topper track? If we want Eagle to stick around, we need to put that bug in someone's ear. It's not an entirely simple conversion, but it's got to be cheaper than the Ibox track.

^^Both HFEC and Premier "believe" in this park, but obviously HFEC had a specific vision that they weren't going to fully implement until they actually owned the park. If HFEC had gotten the park back in 2013 or 2014 we'd have a completely different outlook for the place. Predator would have gotten the RMC treatment, the rest of the park's areas would have been rebuilt, and the resort areas of the park would have gotten a lot nicer. It would have turned into a completely upgraded experience. It could still do that, but Premier's vision will definitely be a little more generic than HFEC's quality-driven philosophy. I'm not sure why Premier let Elitch fall through their fingers, unless it was to spend all their capital on DL.... Let's just hope this park doesn't end up in the hands of another stingy investment group. That would be a sad outcome after all this time for a park that has so much potential but needs someone to actually implement a complete plan.

It's impossible to upkeep on something like that. Worlds of Fun was the only park to have them installed professionally, which involved a process of stapling the LED's to trees. As the trees grew over time, the lights started looking bad because they were pretty much choking the trees they were attached to, forcing them to break. Hope this helps Meh, it's not that hard to keep up a few lights. They just decided it wasn't worth the effort. There are a million things parks could put more effort into that we would all enjoy to some degree, but they are in business to maximize profits and at the end of the day they will seek to do as little expense as required to get a reasonable number of people through the gates. As for the header - I think I count three separate coasters that aren't in WOF already in that image. The green one is a little more obvious, but like everyone else I think they just took some artistic liberties. There's no way the people in charge of these graphics would even care enough to include a coaster that's a year or more out from being in the park. That doesn't mean it's too early to jump on the hype train for 2016 though. There's got to be a reason they scrimped this year.

There's nothing special about how the amusement industry treats concrete, it's the same as any other application. Most, if not all, rebar used today is coated with Epoxy to hinder corrosion. Sometimes Epoxy isn't even necessary if your design doesn't have a terribly long service life or critical implementation, but I think at this point the cost of epoxy is fairly negligible at this point so it's just kind of standard now. There's also galvanization. Here's a resource that talks a little about it, but consider that it is a bit of a biased source for galvinization. https://www.galvanizeit.org/uploads/publications/Galvanized_Rebar_vs_Epoxy_Rebar.pdf I think everything I've ever designed with concrete has used epoxy coated rebar, but I've only done a couple of footers and a small parking lot. It's not exactly a specialty of mine, but you can make a career out of specializing in concrete design and technology.

So I got back yesterday from my 2000+ mi road trip, of which Carowinds was the farthest point. I was impressed by this park and am really glad I got the opportunity to travel all the way from Tulsa to visit this year. The coaster collection here is superb with the big 3 B&M's, a great classic arrow, and the classic out and back wooden combo, and the vekoma flyer. I was pessimistic about Fury after it was announced. From the renderings it looked like it was a coaster made mostly to make the front entrance look good and was too stretched out to provide any fun moments. I can now say I was 100% wrong and that B&M knew what they were doing because this coaster was probably the funnest ride to ride over and over again on the entire trip. It does have a couple of blah moments that might have been addressed better if they weren't working around the entrance, but the total ride experience was tremendous. I was blown away by how much fun the outbound curves were while going that fast, and by how much airtime was given by the final hills. I've been around this hobby long enough that I should have known better than to make judgements before riding, but this will be a lesson I won't forget! I found Carolina Cyclone to be surprisingly good for a classic arrow looper. It wasn't too rough, and the inversions were taken at the right speed to be pretty fun. Afterburn is probably the best B&M looping coaster I've ever been on, and of course I thought Intimidator was excellent as well, albeit with a disappointing ending. With this trip I've experienced three B&M 200ft+ coasters now, and I'm definitely a huge fan. It's a shame that Thunder Road is leaving this park as I really did think it added a lot of appeal to the place, but it seems like the locals and the PTB don't feel the same. It's like the coaster is a red-headed step child for the park with the way its unpainted and worn-looking and with its station is tucked away in a back corner behind games and a frozen ice stand. It didn't feel like a celebrated coaster, in contrast to Racer at King's Island that I also experienced on this trip. The ride itself is good though. While it doesn't have a huge amount of airtime and is a little rough in the wrong seats, it is fun and a classic experience that I enjoyed marathoning. It felt like a little more work put into it would make it really great again, but it simply isn't looked at as a good coaster now that there are so many great steel coasters in the park. The only thing wrong with this coaster is that it is in the way - it just seems like a big waste of our quickly diminishing classic wooden coaster population. Let's hope they don't get any ideas about KI's Racer!

Weird but great day today at this park. I'll have to write more about my reactions soon, but for now I'll say it was crazy how busy the park was for a cold, overcast random Tuesday in early June. I ended up splurging on a fast pass though and had a great day of it. Operations were pretty great, but it was odd how the B&M coasters were the ones having most of the technical difficulties throughout the day.

So today started off a little rocky. I slept in and got there about 45mins late, it was raining, and the first thing I saw walking in was the sign saying both voyage and thunderbird were down. Even though it was an odd monday in June, the park was busy with a number of school groups. With only one train ops running on both coasters, I waited a bit over 30 mins for raven and then maybe 45 mins for legend, which got stuck on the lift for a few minutes right before I was about to get on. At this point I was worried that I had picked a lousy day to come and that HW was going to phone it in as a lame Monday - but then things quickly turned around. Both raven and legend got their second trains on, then they got voyage open which took a bunch of pressure off of the other two and made things bearable. Then at about 3pm or so thunderbird was finally ready. Surprisingly, all the school kids left at around 5-6, leaving everything a walk-on with two train ops. I had an absolute blast marathon riding both voyage and thunderbird. Thunderbird truly was an excellent and all-around sensible addition for this park, and is a blast to ride over and over again. I could only marathon voyage in the front since I'm turning into an old man and it gives me headaches anywhere else, but at the end of the day I got to stay in the front seat with an empty station until the park closed. Night rides on the voyage in the front seat are incredible. I'm so glad I got that experience. I can definitely see why HW has been talked up so much all these years. I'm so happy I could finally see it for myself, and I'm sure I'll be back again sometime soon!

I'm at the park today too. If you see a guy with glasses, a brown beanie, and a brown sweater, it's probably me. Rough start to the day. Light rain, I got here late, and both Thunderbird and Voyage are down. I'm in line for Raven and operations feel like they are crawling. Hope it gets better when it dries off this afternoon.

So after a full day's visit, I've changed my tune just a tad about whether or not RMC is really needed at SFStL. The Boss was a bit rougher for some reason today - maybe it was due to more people on the train or the lack of rain. The second row, which on most coasters is typically far enough forward to escape the worst bashing, was brutal. I still love the layout and the intensity, but even just adding topper track to the worst locations would do a huge deal of good here. They don't need to go crazy with an expensive I-Box conversion, just let them fix the few parts that are actually broken. The line got large today even with fairly small crowds and the roughness of this ride, reflecting it's continued popularity. I think it would be silly not to get RMC to do some reasonable, minor modifications. Screamin Eagle is good though, it just needs typical classic coaster maintenance. American Thunder is a top-notch coaster as it stands. I agree that Ninja's space could probably be put to better use with a new coaster, but it is worth noting that the coaster does still seem to get some crowds through it. It's rough in spots, but not unbearable like some of the larger Arrow creations have gotten at times. It sucks that I'll miss out on the Justice League ride. I was a bit miffed that they are advertising how various levels of pass holders get to "preview" for the entire week before it actually "opens". That makes it sound like they could have just opened it this weekend but want another reason to push not just season passes, but gold season passes. I hope I'm being off base here, but that's the stuff that drives me nuts about parks these days and I hope it's not a sign of more to come.

I got into the park late today, but the place was pretty empty so I got a number of rides on boss, American thunder and some others. This is the first time I've been to the park since before the boss existed, and man, I'm impressed. I truly hope that if it gets RMC treatment, they just add topper track and keep the layout the same. It might be my new favorite coaster, RMC doesn't need to add any more craziness to it. Screaming eagle would be painful to loose too, and American Thunder is awesome as it is as well - so honesty, other than adding topper track, this isn't a park that really needs RMC to upgrade its coasters. I'm really looking forward to tomorrow. This park is so much better than I remembered!

The writing was on the wall when a bunch of GCI's primary engineers and staff left to form their own company last year. I LOVE GCII's, don't get me wrong, but the wooden coaster industry has been disrupted and steel tracked wooden supported coasters will always win over the traditional design. All wooden coasters take a lot of maintenance that parks have always struggled to keep up with on both a cost and technical knowledge standpoint. You can hardly compete with a product that gets rid of a lot of that burden. The few clients out there who do want traditional coasters will be taken by TGG, who seem to have a skilled international sales platform. What I'd like is for GCII to come up with their own new advancement in track technology. RMC can't have patented every conceivable method of building up a stiffer track section. GCII's layouts and trains are unique and fill a certain niche in my mind, but if they cost too much to keep up they'll be little more than memories soon. Unfortunately, I'm not sure GCII has the money or skill left in the company to make a new product line at this point. They will go down as industry legends at the very least. Anyone who had an opportunity to ride a GCII creation in it's prime got to experience something special.

Finally, a substantial update: http://impactnews.com/houston-metro/tomball-magnolia/grand-texas-developer-reveals-updated-theme-park-plans/ Sounds like what I expected, but it's great to finally get a clear message from the horse's mouth. I'm really curious as to what happened with the original engineering firm. Sounds like they went cheap originally and got someone without the proper qualifications and experience. Having to completely re-do the traffic and layout of the entire property is pretty huge, and then finding out that the power grid isn't big enough? That's a lot of wasted time and money. Sounds like things are really rolling along now that the major issues behind the scenes have been ironed out.

The real life profile on this thing looks a lot better than the concept art. That's certainly been a trend lately. The drop out of the first turnaround is a lot bigger than I expected, and those other little hills look like they'll be great. That little airtime hill next to the break run and the very last hill both look like they'll be signature moments.

I'm planning to leave on Friday, hitting the first park first thing Saturday morning. I theoretically have until tomorrow to change plans... Parks I'll be visiting are: SFStL, Holiday World, Kings Island, Dollywood, Carowinds, and Lake Winnie. Possibly even Magic Springs on the way back. I know HFEC is reasonable with rain policies, and Cedar Fair is usually OK, so I think I'll at least be able to get the major rides in. I think I'm probably going to end up going for it. I'll have to update and let you guys know how it worked out for future reference.

So for the past year I've been planning a pretty decent road trip through Missouri, Indiana, Ohio, Tennessee, and North Carolina - but now it's looking like there will be a good chance that it will be raining off-and-on for a good portion of the trip. I could potentially reschedule to mid-late July, but that could end up being a hassle with my boss and everything else that will be going on in the middle of summer. So who has any experiences with this dilemma? Is there a threshold where you would just go for it, or is it not worth it? I'm kinda wondering if the trade-off between less theoretical ride time and less crowds could be worth it anyway.

Perfectly stated ytterbiumanalyst! That's exactly what I would have said! About lodging: Deer Run has always worked out well for us. The rooms aren't anything to speak of, but it's clean and it's right next to the park. There's a shuttle right to SDC's front gate. The Best Western nearby is also supposed to be decent and also has a shuttle. In Branson itself there are a litany of small hotels that have very similar rooms for similar rates. There are a number of bad apples in the bunch, so you'd have to look for recent reviews that look trustworthy, but a lot of it is the same wherever you go. Classic motor inn is a good one, and they give a discount if you mention SDCFans. If you want a nicer room than the typical Branson minimum, there is a good Holiday Inn and the downtown hilton isn't that pricy comparatively.

I would definitely buy a rumor that WOF will get a new entrance soon. Even aside from the current trend, WOF's entrance has always been wack. I guess they're probably not going to want to move those buildings around, but they can certainly do a lot to fix up that awkward long walk from the parking lot. Or maybe they'll even just move the front gates out to the parking lot - that'd free up some easy space for some new stuff.

Yeah, it's a big deal for them. I wouldn't take my kids somewhere that is known for having massive fights break out. If KW isn't able to nip this in the bud and restore pubic confidence it'll become a difficult part of their identity to shake. It's the young families that make up most of any park's revenue, and they can be scared away easily. This is probably the worst PR a park can get because it's always going to be hard to convince scared people that the problem has been "fixed".

My visit yesterday was nice, though the fact that WOF's two wooden coasters were closed was a bummer. It was also kind of annoying how sluggish they were at getting the rides open with the park. When the park opens people of course tend to mostly shoot towards Mamba, but it took until about 30 minutes after the park opened for it to finally get done testing. I got tired of waiting and went to try to find something else to do, but the other rides I went to were in a similar situation. It seemed like they just didn't care because there weren't that many people in the park yet. Don't bother getting there at park opening, I guess. Most of their operations were decent enough though. Hard to say what was going on with Prowler. They were trying to get it open, but weren't able to. I saw a train stuck awkwardly on the first part of the break run, and maintenance people were actually climbing around in the supports and hammering on the track. Seems odd... I hadn't kept up with the news on Timberwolf - I knew it was supposed to be worked on, but I thought there would be a chance it would be done by now. Currently the entire bottom and pull-out of the first drop is completely gone. There's a lot of miscellaneous new wood around the ride, but most of it doesn't seem to be very consequential. Who knows how far they are planning to go with the current retracking, but it would be odd if they just rebuild the first drop and then "band-aid" the rest with a few new boards when the entire track really needs to be replaced. This coaster was unbearable last October, but it has a great classic layout, so I'm very happy they're working on it. Just wish they could have done it sooner and had it at least close to ready by now. I know it's SOP to not even try to have everything open until summer, but I've never agreed with that personally. ThunderHawk was running though, which was awesome! Finally got to experience a Huss Top Spin, and I really enjoyed it even if the ride cycle is a bit short. Cyclone Sam's is still a star of this park. I always forget how much I love that thing until I visit. It's seriously a flash of brilliance and the type of thing that WOF needs to get back to doing more of. I love that it's a simple carnival ride that through theming and attention to detail is turned into a truly unique and awesome experience. It's just simply a well thought-out ride through a through. There were plenty of signs of off-season TLC to the park. A couple of the train trestles seemed to be completely rebuilt.

^Have you guys never heard the trololo song before? Here, thank me later: I'm expecting something big in 2016 for WOF. The park is the only attraction of it's kind for hours in every direction, in the middle of a huge metro with millions of people. It gets packed out regularly. I'm still scratching my head at why they didn't get anything this year, unless it is to prepare for something huge in the near future. I agree with Woodie Warrior that a launched coaster with inversions would be ideal - and I don't mean one of the Premier sky loop clones. I'll actually be visiting tomorrow. I decided to take a somewhat spur of the moment trip to Lawrence/KC. Lawrence is a pretty awesome place.

It's not actually though, right? I've heard nothing of the sort. I'll be going to the park for the first time in June, and even if it's not great of a ride I'd hate to miss out on two credits. Same thing here. Thunder Road is actually one of the more anticipated rides for me on my big multi-park road trip this summer. I really really love old style out and back wooden coasters. I will be VERY unhappy if it's closed in June.