TombRaiderFTW

It's worth noting that amusement parks as a whole--and Kings Island is no exception--can be treated as and are treated as daycare services by some people. A pass is cheaper than a babysitter, and some people seem to think an amusement park is just as safe. It's not. Bad things happen at parks, too.

Oooh... I'm tempted to go. I only went to the first Coasterstock. The Mystic Timbers ERT is especially tempting...

I feel like "it's going to separate Mystic Timbers from any wooden roller coaster" is one of those ways of saying something without saying anything. Are there any other wooden coasters with some kind of show scene at the end of the ride? I can't think of any.

Knoebels is owned by the Knoebel family. Or maybe it's "Knoebels family"? I'm not really sure. Either way, people with a last name that's very similar to the park's name are who own the park.

I think that's an awfully broad stroke to paint if Shoot the Rapids alone will keep Cedar Fair from adding water rides. I think the bigger issue at hand is just that there aren't that many new kinds of water rides out there (outside of waterpark slides, I mean.) Hopkins makes traditional flumes. Intamin made whatever you call Pilgrim's Plunge, Shoot the Rapids, and Divertical, and they still offer traditional flume rides, White Water Canyon-type rides, and Congo Falls-type rides. That's pretty much all that's happened for several years. Mack made Pulsar, but that's very new and arguably just a more coastery version of Congo Falls. If you look at what the Cedar Fair parks currently have as water rides, they actually have a lot of their bases covered when it comes to current water ride offerings. It would appear, based on Cedar Fair's recent spending habits, that there's more money for them in investing in waterpark additions if they're thinking about adding water-related attractions.

Is it weird that I'm oddly excited for the trick track just before the turn into the shed? It's a little quirk that makes Mystic Timbers unique, even among GCI's rides. You don't see trick track on a lot of coasters these days.

Interesting... It definitely does look like you exit onto the train platform. I'm sure there will some kind of fencing to keep people from doing whatever on the platform. That's just not where I had expected the exit in my mind. Makes sense, though, I suppose! That picture definitely reinvigorated my excitement for Mystic Timbers, though! Only (a guesstimated) 100 days till Opening Day!

^ From the first page of this thread:

^ What did we do wrong to deserve that trade? TRFTW, just teasing, but also not a fan of looping swinging ships.

With actual maintenance, it's unlikely that they'd leave. Several wooden coasters have been around many multiples of the amount of time that RMC has existed. All roller coasters can be made to last indefinitely, as long as the park is willing to shell out the money to keep all aspects of them functioning well. I think it just boils down to demand versus profit, honestly--if people stop riding Racer, it will go away. If something prohibited Racer's trains from being maintained and the demand didn't justify purchasing new trains, it would go away. If the park decided that an Vekoma SLC in Racer's location would draw more people in than Racer, Racer might go away. I doubt Kings Island will ever be able to separate Beast from its identity, so I don't look for that to go away until the day the park closes, barring catastrophe, pestilence, or a plague of termites. Beast is why a lot of people across multiple generations visit the park. In my mind. Racer isn't quite as iconic, but still significant. Between significance and its pretty limited location, I don't look for it to leave soon, either. That being said, if the park WERE ever to remove one of them... I'd say they're heading for the trash pile. I don't see Cedar Fair or any other park chain being intent on preservation enough to try to move either one. Beast is too customized for the terrain, too. EDIT: Oh, yeah--as far as the "how do I not think about Opening Day" thing goes... I've been at this "coaster enthusiast" gig for almost nine years now, and I'm still trying to figure it out.

I don't think it's necessarily a big surprise that there's a transfer track... That's standard on every GCI and every multi-trained coaster I can think of. They need to be able to take trains off and put trains on the track easily...

If this is true, I do hope they wait to make this change until 2018 passes go on sale. 2017 all-season bottles have been available to purchase for a while now. This doesn't need to be another example of selling something and changing the rules later.

Interesting! I wonder why they went with The Gravity Group instead of GCI. At any rate, more wooden coasters in Florida maintained well by Fun Spot is never a bad thing!

Okay! Glad to know I'm not alone. Yeah, it's not too annoying, and Tapatalk doesn't have that issue. I'll have to try zooming in/out or using another browser. Thanks!

Every once in a while when posting from my phone (HTC One M9, Android 6.0) on the mobile version of these forums (NOT Tapatalk), I will reach a point where typing letters on my phone's keyboard will not create text in the text box. My keyboard will act like all is well and offer auto-corrections, but nothing will show up in the text box except an occasional punctuation mark. If I press backspace, it will act like I'm deleting text, even though the cursor isn't moving. Regardless of what state I leave the post in, the only text that will show up in the post when I hit submit is whatever I could get to show up in the text box. I can delete the text that properly appeared and retype anything I like in its place, but once I hit whatever character limit it is that causes this glitch, I can't get anything to show up besides the occasional period. I've tried using a different forum skin, and nothing changes. If I try to edit, it will act no differently. For now, I've downloaded Tapatalk. Has anyone else experienced this, or is my phone just going crazy?

Amusement Dark IS being used. That's what Cedar Fair has been referring to its recent dark ride projects as--it's all part of the Amusement Dark initiative. EDIT: Sorry, the forum software (or my phone?) was glitching on me and wouldn't let me keep typing--had to download Tapatalk to edit this. What I meant to add: If you look at some of Cedar Fair's recent internal stuff, like their quarterly reports, you'll find Amusement Dark referenced there.

Here's what it says on Heide Park's website (link), as translated by Google: So, there you have it. I think that's the first time I've ever heard of retracking an Intamin prefab woodie.

At one point back when Holiday World was trying to make Timberliners happen on Voyage, it was revealed that they had paid something like $600,000 for two trains. Someone here with industry knowledge pointed out that that would be a great deal for one train. Later on, one or both of those trains showed up on a used ride website. I don't remember the price, but I don't think they were over $1 million. That was a couple years ago. I can't remember what site they were on, or else I'd check to see if they're still there. If no one has bought them, I'd wonder if one of them is heading to Kentucky Kingdom. $500,000 for a new train AND additional work on the ride sounds like a pretty good deal...

Good. I think that's the most responsible thing that Schlitterbahn could do in this situation. Hopefully, the family and witnesses have found closure.

I liked the idea of Son of Beast, but I really didn't like much of the ride itself. If you enjoyed it, I'm happy for you. Two of my friends absolutely loved the thing. I don't really get it, but different strokes for different folks! I rode it many times in 2008 and a few times in 2009. I never rode it with the loop. In terms of the ride experience, everything from the station through the big drop after the lift* was alright. Fun, even. I think I'm plagiarizing a post from bkroz from a long time ago when I say that the immense speed of it felt "wrong," but in a really fun way. As you plunged down the HUGE drop, you'd pick up speed in a way that just didn't feel "proper" for a wooden coaster--and that's just because there was nothing like it. It was generally smooth, but the little jostles you'd get at that tremendous speed just made it feel powerful in a way that's kinda hard to describe. It's just my imagination, but there was something unintentionally theatrical and dramatic about that that I really haven't ever found in another ride. There really wasn't airtime on the first drop--at least not with the Gerstlauer trains, anyway--but I don't really fault it for that. Beast doesn't really have any, either, so I didn't mind its "sequel" not having any. The feeling of speed on the first drop wasn't unlike what people appreciate about Millennium Force, except with wood. (* I say "big drop after the lift" because technically the first drop was the one right out of the station. The turnaround after the lift was a small drop, so I can't just say "the drop after the lift" because technically it was the second drop after the lift. Back in the day, people around here used to give people who'd talk about Son of Beast's "first drop" a hard time because of that. I'm sure some wiseguy around here might bring it up, so I'm just being careful! ) Unfortunately, that's about where my enjoyment of SoB ended. When I watch POVs of it online, I can literally remember the way the jostling felt on that subsequent fan turn--the whole train would rock back and forth, and you could feel the guide wheels finding the left rail, then the right rail, then the left rail, and so on with side-to-side jerks. You'd make it over that hill and shimmy your way down into the most rattling series of turns I've ever experienced. The only two rides I've been on that have ever come close to that amount of shaking were Gwazi and Boardwalk Bullet, but those still aren't/weren't quite the same. On Gwazi and BB, the jackhammering was brief because of the briefness of the turns; on Son of Beast, you'd spend multiple seconds shuddering your way through the bottoms of the helices. It literally made my chest ache for a bit after getting off. You'd have a brief moment of peace when you pulled onto the MCBR--before the brakes caught you and brought you down to a near stop, anyway. Then it was down, over the jolting hop where the loop was, up into more shaking in the second double helix and around that last turn. You'd hop back up to the final brakes, where, without fail, I'd always hear: CHK-CHK-CHK-CHK-CHK-chk-chk-OOF! The "OOF," of course, coming from the riders who just went from 40 miles per hour to 0 in 2 seconds. Honestly, I think the sounds of that ride are what I'll remember most--especially the LOUD lift and the chk-chk-chk-oof of the final brakes. All that being said, there are two ways I have to compliment Son of Beast: 1. I did have one memorably good ride on it. It was a pretty damp night during the summer of 2008, and there was a light mist coming down. I want to say I rode in the last car? I can't remember at this point. Regardless, the ride was absolutely flying, and the roughness really wasn't that noticeable. It was sincerely fun from start to finish (chk-chk-chk-oofs notwithstanding.) 2. The idea of Beast having a "sequel" or "son" is just a cool idea, and it's definitely symptomatic of Paramount's way of doing things at the time. The period in which Action Zone, Son of Beast, and Tomb Raider: The Ride came to be, in my opinion, is probably the "golden era" of the Paramount years. (At the very least, those are the years that I remember the most and started forming memories of the park, and I do get nostalgic for them.) It was the time for big budgets, big movie themes, big media days, and big risks that may or may not have worked out. It makes sense that a movie studio would make a sequel out of their star ride. There's something kinda magical about that to me. I'm sure there are people here who cringe at how much the park changed around that time. Like I said, different strokes! It's just a shame that a lot of the rides and experiences from that era mostly didn't work out. TR:TR, SoB, and Italian Job (in its original form) weren't sustainable; Action Zone's plans for guests to get caught in the middle of a movie suffered from very poor timing and were quietly cancelled; and the park changed hands and shifted into "cheap and cheerful" expansions until Cedar Fair finally purchased Paramount Parks. It's fun sometimes to think about what could have been if those things had worked out--what if one of the other manufacturers who placed a bid for Son of Beast (like CCI) had gotten the job; what if Tomb Raider had a big enough impact to it to be kept up with... It's been said around here before that Tomb Raider was a test for Paramount to see if they wanted to drop that kind of money into more rides. (Or something to that effect?) If those had worked out, would we be talking about Cedar Fair's ownership today? Would we have gotten Diamondback, a different B&M invert somewhere else, or Mystic Timbers? Would Kings Island look more like Cedar Point or Universal? I'm sure there are thousands of ways to think about it. It's just fun to wonder sometimes. One last thing: if Kings Island ever decides to use the area currently occupied by Son of Beast's station and queue for something else, I really hope they'll reconsider the flow of that area. It was a little awkward when Son of Beast was open, and it's almost just as awkward now. When Son of Beast was open and when Wolf Pack is open, you've got two "on" ramps towards rides and two "off" ramps converging in the same area. It's really not intuitive, and the extended queue formerly for Son of Beast seems very out-of-the-way and afterthought-y. The signage during Haunt helps, but it's still weird. I know it's complicated because that service road runs overhead and ADA-compliant paths have to fit in somewhere, but wowee. There's gotta be some way of simplifying that area down. It's not quite as awkward as that point at Holiday World where the path to Thunderbird meets the former path to Pilgrim's Plunge and the current path to Hyena Falls, but it's close. EDIT: I forgot to answer one of the questions: if Son of Beast reopened somehow, of course I'd ride it. Who wouldn't? Even if you hated it, you know you'd try it again after this many years to see if you still disliked it.

There at least used to be. It was probably 60% or 70% of the way through. I believe there were plastic spiders on the wall and a giant spider prop overhead. I know you had to be touching the right wall to actually experience it last year. Every time I went through this year, they had us follow the left wall. I never thought to look and see if it was still there.

Thanks for the update. I always enjoy reading your articles!

If there's an angle they can get of the water area from the train shed, I'd guess a second cam would go there. Especially since that might get them much closer to the construction back there for the tunnel and the run back over to Mystic Timbers's shed.

CCI is my favorite coaster company. I really think the way they designed their roller coasters will never be beat (in terms of fun when they're running well, anyway. Maintenance-wise... Not so much.) I love how a lot of their banking is usually done during airtime, and banking is used sparingly. The laterals and airtime hit hard and suddenly. There really isn't anyone else from 1990 to now who comes to mind who uses a formula like that but still manages to keep things fresh. Their rides from the mid-90's tend to be their best at that, in my opinion. The 2000 & 2001 rides are still very good, but a lot of them seem to have drawn-out elements and a little less bite than their earlier rides. Granted, I haven't ridden all of them, either... And even then, one of their coasters from 2000 is my favorite wooden coaster (Boss.)

It is being reported that Wildfire has had permits revoked and is now SBNO. Allegedly, they were revoked on the grounds of the ride having a larger environmental impact than expected, including noise levels. The Swedish court pointed out that no one has submitted a back-up plan for the environmental impact. Coasterhub.com has an article on it that contains a link to a Swedish article. Here's a link to Coasterhub: http://coasterhub.com/archives/18575 The Swedish article indicates that there is no way for the court's decision to be appealed, but it may be able to stay if a plan is prepared and submitted. It will be interesting to see how this develops in the future. The article (after translated by Google) says, in essence, that the court's decision may require Kolmarden to tear the ride down.