Wooden coasters: towering, majestic, beautifully designed, classic. But the same woodies that look so wondrous from afar can be rickety, shaky and head-jangling to ride. As trains wear down their wood tracks, a coaster that was once smooth becomes more and more difficult to handle over time. How do you solve the problem? The answer used to be to call in experts to repair the tracks. But now park owners are turning to a new option: replacing the wood tracks with bendable, pliable steel and turning the coaster into a thrilling hybrid.
One company in northern Idaho, Rocky Mountain Construction, has forged a business out of this practice and, in the process, has become responsible for turning a handful of existing wooden coasters into some of the most thrilling, contemporary and innovative rides in the coaster world. The rides often keep much of their look intact, maintaining a lot of the wood that makes up their basic structure, but now running through them is a sleek, shiny, colorful steel track that stands out from the wood and makes the overall attraction feel more 21st century.
A signature project by the company, founded by Fred Grubb and Suanne Dedmon 15 years ago, is its rehabilitation of Colossus, a giant white wooden coaster near the parking lot at the edge of Six Flags Magic Mountain in Valencia, California. The dual-track racing coaster had been a staple at the park since 1978, thrilling generations of riders and undergoing generations of wear and tear.
The ride closed in 2014 for an ambitious “reprofile,” a term that means taking an existing ride and changing the track to create a new experience. Much of the wood stayed, along with the dual racing track concept. But the company turned the dual track coaster into a Moebius loop track, where the racing happens all on one continuous track instead of on two separate ones. Riders leave the station riding on a blue track, but instead of going back to the station, their ride continues on the green track right next to the blue one. They complete the second section of the ride while a new train is sent out to race theirs. This extends the ride time by a full minute from the original.
The track has elements that would have been unheard-of on the old version of Colossus, like a “top gun stall,” an inversion where the train slows down while upside down. It also has a “high five,” a part of the ride where the two tracks hit overbanked turns at the same time facing each other, giving the illusion that you can reach out and high-five the other riders. The interactive elements make for a roller coaster experience that is as social as it is exhilarating.
The work of reprofiling coasters rather than building a ride from scratch can engender creativity in interesting ways, as designers must work within the limitations of an existing coaster to come up with fresh ways to improve it.
One of many of the surprising elements on Twisted Colossus, which opened in 2015, occurs before the ride gets to its first lift. On the way out to the lift hill, the track has a series of small bumps and curves.
“We thought, why don’t we mix it up a little bit,” said Jake Kilcup, chief operating officer of Rocky Mountain Construction. “It’s almost like it’s a little kiddie coaster on the way out to the lift.”
The creativity was born of a very technical need. Grubb and Dedmon formed Rocky Mountain Construction in 2001, after Grubb realized that he was spending much of his time fixing the same wooden coasters over and over again.
He collaborated with coaster engineer Alan Schilke to come up with a new track technology, one that wouldn’t require consistent repairs. One of those tracks, called the IBox (also known as Iron Horse), is made up of an all-steel track system that replaces the wood stacks that many wooden coaster tracks sit on. The steel is more stable and more malleable, allowing for wild and innovative coaster elements (like inversions or overbanked turns, where the train goes up on its side) that traditional wood tracks had not been able to handle.
The first use of the IBox track was in 2011 on the Texas Giant at Six Flags Over Texas in Arlington. This mammoth wooden coaster, which originally opened in 1990, was transformed into an even more intense ride that included steeper drops and more aggressive turns.
“Six Flags took a risk on this partnership that was, at the time, Fred working out of his garage and Alan working out of his house,” Kilcup said in a phone interview.
That risk paid off. The new Texas Giant was a hit, garnering strong reviews and generating a renewed popularity at the park. Six Flags went on to work on a number of collaborations with Rocky Mountain that involved reprofiling a coaster. The Six Flags reprofiles have included the Iron Rattler at Fiesta Texas, Wicked Cyclone at Six Flags New England, and the behemoth of the bunch, Twisted Colossus.
In addition to doing reprofiles, Rocky Mountain is continuing to innovate with original designs as well, like Lightning Rod, their newest ride at Dollywood, billed as the world’s fastest wooden coaster (with a top speed of 73 mph), and the first wooden coaster with a launch.
For a while, it seemed that the golden age of wooden coasters was over, that they’d be outshone by their hardier steel competitors. But this company may be ushering in a wooden coaster renaissance.
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