texcoaster

I must agree here. I haven't been back to ride it since it was changed, and it sounds like I don't want to. There was brutal back-seat airtime at the crest of every hill and insane "ejector floaters" over the top of every camelback. The back seat air was so brutal, in fact, that they loaded the trains first-come-first-served (no queueing for individual seats) and even though I was about the 15th person through the gate, I got the back seat without a problem. NOBODY wanted to ride back there. I soon found out why. Thigh bruises for two days afterward!

Even though $10 is "cheap" compared to other places, it's still IMHO a bad first impression. Think about a family of four without season passes and the amount of money it takes for a day at the park. Making them pay a lot just to put the car somewhere (particularly when there is no public transit to the park) is just insulting. Not as insulting as paying two or three times that much to park at a sporting venue, but insulting nonetheless.

I've seen nearly every thread that has to do with Six Flags contain complaints about the new corporate management and how all the decisions being made are "wrong" and how the new policies "won't work" and how the company is going to go to hell in a handbasket because of it. So. You're the CEO now. What do you do? What policies are you going to implement in the next couple of years to make the parks more successful? Do you close any parks? Change operating procedures? Price changes? Discuss. I'll start by saying that I'd reduce parking rates by 50%. Premium parking would be at whatever price regular parking is now, or $10, whichever is cheaper. Under no circumstances should someone have to pay more than $10 to park a car. It's a very, VERY bad first impression for the guest. Disposable single-sheet maps available at entrance turnstyles that list today's shows and times. The back would list height requirements for the rides. Coasters and other rides with multiple vehicles would run at full capacity. If you OWN two trains, then you RUN two trains. Period. If those trains are only half full, then so be it. Every major ride will have a "single riders queue". Get out of the foodservice business. Rent out your food stalls to name-brand restaurants and charge them a premium rental. You get the money without having to hire the staff or mess with the hassle. Also, if the food is lousy and overpriced, the customer blames the restaurant, not the park. Free drinks. If a little park like Holiday World can do it, anyone can. Having to pay $5 for a large Coke is another very, very bad impression left on the customer. Continue to make it ungodly expensive to bring your family here, and families won't come at all.

The video footage was filmed before the trackwork was done. It was, in fact, filmed before the TPR video shoot. The music is "O Fortuna" from Carl Orff's "Carmina Burana". It has been used in dozens of movies and commercials. If you like it, I highly recommend hearing it live. It takes a full orchestra, 28 pieces of percussion, two grand pianos, a large adult choir, a boy's choir, and a big stage to hold all of it. The opening is full-on fortissimo and will peel the paint off the walls. For orchestral music, it freaking ROCKS. The Houston Symphony is doing it this weekend. They perform it every couple of years because it's a cash cow. They usually double the ticket prices and still sell out every performance. That said, I agree that it's not very appropriate for a western-themed coaster.

Then why do they go? I think you've hit the nail on the head as to why there will be an admission fee. Folks like the ones you describe are basically in the way. BPB is full of narrow walkways, and when the place is really crowded, it's miserable. Reducing the number of folks present to just those who are actually there to DO SOMETHING will make it a bit less packed and more enjoyable for everyone.

I'm actually glad that they went to lockers instead of the abovementioned system. A *LOT* of load/unload time is wasted with people crossing through the train, waiting for the previous riders to get their stuff and get out of the way, putting their stuff in the cubby, then returning to their seat... assuming they remember which seat they were going to sit in. I'm a big fan of having the lockers at the front of the queue, ala IOA, but I think they should be FREE. Tourists bring cameras. You require that they leave the camera in a locker, but then you charge them $1 every time? That sounds like REALLY bad customer relations to me.

NOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!! The ONLY redeeming thing about RollerCoaster is the complete lack of restraints on the trains. They're really unique, funky trains, too. If they put BD's trains on it, I hope they at least remove the lap bars first.

They could've called it: Batman: the Mirror-Image Great White 2 Copy-Cat KUJo (Keeping Up with the JOneses) ...But This One Turns Right or go way outside the box and do a Star Wars theme and call it Clone Wars

I rode it in 2002. When I went back in 2005, it was closed. Did they reprofile the track or something? I think I heard somewhere that they changed the cars, but that wouldn't change the Gs.

For sure: SFOT, SFFT, Magic Springs Almost 100%: SFA, SFGAd, Hershey, Dorney, Knoebels, BGW, KD, Morey's Probably: CP, KI, HW, SFKK, MI, Ind Beach Hopefully: "Blue Flash" backyard coaster Should EASILY hit #500 this year, as well as my 1000th ride on Boardwalk Bullet

I've not been on Moonsault, and honestly, I don't remember high Gs on Tower of Terror. It might be that the Gs are so brief, or it might be that I was trying really hard not to crap my pants after that drop. Not sure. At any rate, I think that if you're talking extreme Gs, you can't leave out Edmonton's Mindbender, or the "centrifuge" section of SFMM Goliath or SFOT Titan... although Titan's upward helix is even heavier on the Gs.

I read a lot of these posts, worry about the fate of humanity, and then look at the age of the poster and think, "OHHHH... ok. He's never had a physics or engineering class." whew. The biggest problems with many of the designs dreamed up in this thread are stresses on the riders or the structure. Having some sort of system with two cars riding the same track (over/under, whatever) is going to take some seriously massive track structure to support all that weight. Remember, at the bottom of a drop when you're pulling 4 Gs, you have to multiply the weight of both trains and all those riders by a factor of four. That's a LOT of stress on the structure! It's possible, sure, but the track would be extremely expensive and the ride would probably be really, REALLY short to keep the budget in line. As for things like standup inverteds, it's the stress on the riders that will kill the idea. Remember Mantis before the braked the crap out of it? I don't think any of us (well, any of us guys) cherish the idea of pulling all those Gs in an inverted loop while straddling one of those bicycle seats. (insert high-pitched scream here) As for me, I'd like to see some sort of train that's sitting high above the track in the same way an inverted train sits far below it. The center of gravity being so far removed from the track would make for an interesting experience. Curves would be odd-feeling, and inversions would be really strange. As long as you have the cars out there on sticks like that, you might as well make the seats free to swing, like on a ferris wheel. Doing that could allow for high speed screaming-squirrel type drops that go all the way around and under without killing the riders shoulders, since the seats would remain upright the whole time.... they might even flip once! Of course, both of the above examples probably fail the real-world physics/engineering test as well, but since everyone else is dreaming... In the real world, though, I don't see why we can't have a launched woodie.

It wasn't the first. Go back up four posts and read. KI didn't remove the loop because people complained that a wooden coaster shouldn't have one... they removed the loop because people complained that the coaster beat the ever-lovin crap out of them. The physics of getting a loop into the layout required that the trains be much heavier than a regular woodie train and the things were really hard on the track and structure. By removing the loop, they were able to put lighter trains on it and (hopefully) have a ride that they can run all season without having to close it for track repairs every few weeks.

Sorry to say that this is a common misconception, there are older coaster that uses tubular steel track. No one as large as Matterhorn but there still is some older, check RCDB. Coasters prior to Matterhorn used steel track, but not TUBULAR steel track. That was the innovation. Coaster previous to that were similar to the traveling Miler coasters and older Wild Mouse rides, with angle-iron or other such flat rails being used. This is nearly impossible to bend into heavily-banked turns or corkscrew inversions, etc. That's why it wasn't until tubular rails became common that the modern steel coasters really came into their own.

No way. The 1920s had "Loop the Loop" and "Flip-flap railway", both of which were wood.

I think I read somewhere that Big Thunder Mountain (1979) uses LIMs to move the trains in the station area.

Actually, it was 1977. That same year saw another Schwarzkopf shuttle loop and THREE Arrow shuttle loops open as well. Unsure as to which of the five opened first.

I was there Saturday. It ran 68-69 most of the afternoon, then dropped into the 66-67 range after dark. Full trains on every ride! Yachty Gras was going on, so there was about a 3-5 train wait. Had friends down who had never been on it. One of them, from DFW, said that it was about time that Texas got a good wood coaster(!)

So it IS just an oval. Meh. It's not THAT much faster than Kingda Ka... not even fast enough to really notice a difference in speed between the two. The only true advantage will be the force of the launch. At least when TTD or KK get going, they do something besides race to a brake run. If I'm in Germany, I'm sure I'll ride it, but it's not enough to get me to buy a plane ticket by itself.

I've ridden Frank, and I'll tell ya: Frank's got a big deck. Have you seen Frank's big deck? It makes me feel pretty bad for all those coasters with tiny decks. Let's be frank here: Flight Deck gives me a bad case of Afterburn.

OK, so that new rendering (awesome!)... the track layout looks like there's a lot more interesting stuff happening in it than just an oval. Even if there are no real hills, doing all those zig-zags could be cool. I hope like hell they really do the tarmac and fencing. If the wheels actually touch the tarmac and roll, even better (veeeeeeeeeeery long shot, I know).

Post of the year. OMG, we agree on something. I'll second your "post of the year" nomination. The year is still young, though.

The only thing I don't like about the steel poll is the grouping of clones. I understand that it makes filling out the poll MUCH faster (my ride list is close to 400 steelies), but I don't like not being able to distinguish liking one clone much more (or less) than another. Not all Batmen are created equal... and there are some SLCs that I will ride again and others that I would help destroy if given the chance.

Am I the only one who HATES "afterburn"??? Ugh. It sounds like someone with an upset stomach. "Those jalapeno burgers gave me bad afterburn, but I took some Shark Tums and now it's better."

The only things I remember about the park were the inclined railway that took you from the front gate to the park, the two coasters ( a wild mouse and a chance toboggan), and the "hillbilly holdup" on the train ride. The closest thing to the "feel" of the place now is maybe Dollywood, or SDC, but both of those parks are far and away more impressive than Dogpatch was.