Blue Streak Titan track?

I think they should put Titian track on blue streak.

No.

It's already been proven that if a park wants to, they can have a wooden coaster that is relatively smoother and enjoyable while not being boring. See Grizzly at Kings Dominion and Beast at Kings Island.

I was recently on the predator at six flags Darian lake, and it's been re tracked with titian track and I actually experienced airtime and it was the smoothest coaster in the park. The last turn around to the end of the ride isn't retracked and it's quite different. It' supposed to be finished for next season.

No way.

It’s an old woodie; it’s supposed to be rough. To me, that’s part of the appeal.

I was thinking no at first but looking at the ads I think it may be the way to go to cut down on the amount of maintenance. Blue Streak was really rough the last time we rode it. I don't remember it ever being that rough.

I've been riding it since 1965 including one year we rode it 24 times in a row in one hour. That was the first year they added seat belts to the original trains. It was quite smooth that year. Since they don't run the original trains it doesn't have quite the same feel of the original with the buzz bars. I think this new track may bring it back to that level of smoothness to enjoy the awesome air time this ride once had.

Hard pass. If they wanted to do the pre-cut engineered stuff from Gravity Group, that would be fine.

I think they should bring back the buzz bars.

Not sure if it's a direct correlation, but Thunderhawk at Dorney is running beautifully. Not sure what they did to it. We we there this summer after a 20-year hiatus, and we rode it 3 times in a row and enjoyed every bit of it.

That was not true 20 years ago.

I can understand the sentiment on making Blue Streak smoother and a more comfortable ride. I believe it was 2002 when it received a major retracking and made the ride so smooth and fun.

I've also been on Predator at Darien Lake before and after Titan Track. I'll concede that Titan Track made Predator bearable, but I would have preferred the park take the same route as Kings Dominion and Kings Island and do a full rebuild of the track bed. KD even went as far as rebuilding the structure and heartlining the fan turn, which really makes the ride rival other wood coasters out there. Racer at KI has become a smoother ride without the use of Titan Track.

My beef with Titan Track is that you 'know' when you're travelling on that section of track. You could be riding on something that has character and flaws and then suddenly glide on a lifeless section of ride. Prowler at Worlds of Fun and Shivering Timbers at Michigan's Adventure are some good examples of that.

Wood coasters are becoming rarer new additions as time goes on. I'd prefer that parks restore and care for their existing wooden rides. 'Get off my lawn' :)

Lash:

I think they should bring back the buzz bars.

That's never going to happen. It's too easy to get out of them, and it would make the height requirement taller.

Jeff, I am not so sure of that. It's a geometric problem with some surprising twists. I mean, in order to get the second notch on Kings Island's ratchet bars (that's notch #6 on the Blue Streak) I have to stand up. Think about that for a moment. Meanwhile I asked a couple of under-height kids playing on the Phoenix car to see if they could cimb out with the lap bar down...and they couldn't do it.

Yes, it's a non-starter for various reasons, but unfortunately none of those reasons is truly grounded in verifiable safety concerns. In the past 35 years or so, I'm pretty sure the individual ratcheting restraints have lost more riders than the old handlebars have. And yet the restraint rules in ASTM F2291 were engineered to try and put the old lap bars out of existence.

As for the Titan Track idea, I agree with the Gravity Group's commandment: Thou Shalt Not Steel!

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

Are there any coasters out there that have the GG pre-cut track atop a steel structure? That seems like a pretty efficient combo for a wood coaster.

I'm not sure you'd need it. The roughness and washboarding with horizontal lamination happens because the track can flex between the bents. That doesn't really happen as much when you turn it on its side.

And I can absolutely remember how easy it was to get out of buzz bars as a child. I do not recall if the they added seat dividers to make that harder.

But that's kind of what I'm getting at. If GG's track doesn't require much maintenance, and a steel structure doesn't require much maintenance, it would seem to be a combo resulting in a wood coaster with relatively low maintenance cost. Higher upfront cost, obviously, but salves the pain of signing up for several decades of high labor cost when installing one.

That none have (to my knowledge) been built would seem to indicate the ROI case isn't there, but I guess I'd just find that surprising considering the ROI case can obviously be made to build giant steel coasters.

Is that more or less what Voyage is? Even though I assume that's not the pre-cut track, it's still a wooden coaster on a steel structure.

Taking a quick wander over to RCDB, it looks like Voyage is just flagged as "Hybrid", as are other comparable woodies like Hades at Mt Olympus and Great White at Morey's Piers, but there doesn't seem to be a distinct category specifically for wood track/steel structure.

You figure a steel structure for a wooden coaster is always going to be either a consideration of ride intensity (going all the way back to the Harry Traver Cyclones) or environmental exposure (like with Morey's), so those are going to be the main confounders when trying to compare the upkeep 1:1 with a regular wood track/wood structure coaster. It does make you wonder if steel supports were ever part of the conversation for the likes of Son of Beast and the Dinn woodies, and if that would've made any difference on those rides holding up over time.

That all being said, the combo of steel structure plus pre-cut track does, in theory, seem like it would be about as bulletproof of a new wooden coaster as you could get right now.

I used to love Blue Streak as a kid. I’m 26 now and only rode it once this summer. It was so rough and bumpy that it hurt and was not as enjoyable as other coasters for this reason.

Great Escape in NY recently installed a 55’ tall, 40mph wooden GG coaster, and it is absolutely delightful. Smooth, thrilling, quick, and has good G-forces. I ride it over and over again and find it a ton of fun. They also have a 95ft tall, 55mph, 78-year old steel frame/wood track coaster named Comet, but I don’t enjoy it anymore because it is way too rough and bumpy to be fun.

I used to hate Mean Streak and only rode it as a kid just to say I did. SV is now my absolute favorite ride I’ve ever ridden, no question.

Perhaps a Blue Streak retracting wouldn’t be the worst thing… not to mention the extremely faded and worn paint on the wooden sections to the left and right of the track throughout its course.