From Coaster to Coaster
The ultimate hill-seeker takes a coaster challenge: 31 rides, seven parks and three states in six days
BY JIM KNIPPENBERG
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Talk about a life going downhill fast! Thirty-one roller coasters in six days.
On purpose.
This was the Coaster to Coaster Tour - a little excursion to seven amusement parks and a ride on every adult coaster in Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana.
America is, after all, obsessed with roller coasters. According to The Roller Coaster Lover's Companion more than 200 million people a year visit amusement parks, and most of them ride coasters.
Ever notice the longest lines in the park? 'Nuff said.
Coaster capital
That's especially true in Ohio. Among Paramount's Kings Island (seven coasters), Aurora's Geauga Lake (five) and Sandusky's Cedar Point (11) the state has 23 adult coasters - more than any other state in the United States. (Of course, there's a ton of intermediate and kiddie coasters, too.)
Although ratings are subjective and vary widely, the consensus among coaster fans is that Ohio is home to the world's two best: Paramount Kings Island's Beast among wooden coasters and Cedar Point's Magnum XL-200 among steel coasters.
Ohio even is credited with starting today's raging coaster revival. After a frenzy of building in the the '20s and '30s, the coaster industry went flat and remained so until 1972 when Kings Island opened the Racer and started a new building frenzy.
Among engineers and designers in the coaster industry, the Racer is referred to as ''the second coming.''
That rebirth continues today with a vengeance.
How much of a vengeance?
Thirty-four new coasters costing $1,000,000 - $13,000,000 each, opened this season in the United States. Outside the States, 67 more opened this year.
Today, the global coaster count stands at 350 in North America, 700 for the rest of the world.
A blazing 4 mph
Coasters have been an amusement park fixture since 1884 when New York's Coney Island opened Switchback Railway, the first of what's considered the modern coaster. It was 15 feet tall and blazed along at 4 mph, but, hey, it was a beginning.
The real beginning was in the late 18th century, when Catherine the Great devised a primitive version on the hills of the Russian Imperial Summer Palace. Back then, riders rode sleds with wheels and traveled at whatever speeds gravity dictated.
Today, it's different. Computer-driven coasters travel close to 90 mph on tracks climbing more than 200feet. They go upside down, twist through loops and corkscrews and go sideways on tracks beneath the cars or suspended overhead.
The incredible thing is that, thanks to a combination of ingenuity and technical advances, coasters are all different: steel track vs. wooden, inverted vs. right side up, suspended vs. traditional, stand up vs. sit down. It's almost impossible to judge them without going for a ride.
Hence the Coaster to Coaster Tour.
According to Brad Galin, marketing director at International Theme Park Services, there are 39 coasters in Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana. Eliminating the intermediate and kiddie coasters (no fun if they don't tingle the thrill gene, now are they?) and the ones on private property, that leaves 32 coasters to ride and rate. One of those, Twisted Sisters at Kentucky Kingdom, was still under construction at the time of this story.
The criteria
Rate how? Pretty much along the lines used by groups such as American Coaster Enthusiasts (ACE), a national organization of hard core coaster fans, and the National Amusement Park Historical Association, an industry group.
• Air time: Coaster buffs speak of it with reverence. It refers to those brief seconds - usually hurtling downhill - when the butt and the coaster seat part company.
Traditionally, older wood coasters give better air time, but with advances in steel track technology, that's starting to change.
• Smoothness of ride: Not every rider prefers smooth, but the consensus is that if your head's getting banged from side to side while knees and ribs are getting bruised, it's not a ton of fun.
• Dimensions: Those would be the mechanicals, such as height of the big hill, speed, length of track, length of ride, that sort of thing.
• Ambiance: It's the overall look of and from the coaster. What kind of scenery do you catch from the top? Does it travel over a concrete parking lot? Or through the woods? Can you see the river? A lake?
• We added a twist: The Green Gill Barf-o-meter is an estimate of just how close we came to saying goodbye to that funnel cake we snuck between rides.
• And we added another twist: A heart monitor. Specifically, a King of Hearts Express Event Monitor, a little job designed to record whatever the heck the heart is doing, then map it on a computer screen.
The monitor usually helps a cardiologist diagnose by giving a picture of heart activity. But the idea in this story is to see how close a roller coaster comes to killing you.
The answer is, not terribly, though they do cause changes in heart rates. As expected, the more violent the ride, the greater the changes.
Got all that? Fine. Let's go ride.
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