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kitsch transporter

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  1. In the background of the inverted shuttle model you can see the booth of Nauta Bussink. Could this be their model too? Since there is a picture of Evolution in the background, which had its debut in 93 it could have been taken in 1994. For whatever reason Intamin/Giovanola copied the Pinfari layout for the Indiana Jones coasters. The RCDB page mentions that too. I have a question about the Pinfari Supersonic Flight. Did anybody ride that thing? I guess the photo is from Sportland Pier, Wildwood New Jersey, where this ride once operated. RCDB lists it as a Galaxy/Cyclone (without pictures) which it was probably not. I have recently seen a clip on youtube which had a short glimpse of this ride. The drop into the curve looked brutal! People´s heads were popping to the side as if they were about to fall off. I would love to hear some info on this ride. See it here at 2:15
  2. The comparison to Thorpe´s X could simply mean that Alton´s new coaster will also change direction, will (partially) be built indoors and it could still be made by the same manufacturer.
  3. The Freefall concept painting you posted a few pages back is really interesting! It seems they once planned to "suspend" the cars from the tracks so that you stay perpendicular to the ground at all times. This would have prevented all the mechanical repositioning of the car. I wonder why they decided against this technique?! Another thing I have learned from the vintage videos: "Neat" must have been a really hip word amongst kids back then. Is it on purpose that the videos start as soon as you open the page? On my browser all videos start simultaneously when the page has loaded, causing a pretty "neat" cacophony in the process.
  4. That inverter-layout is very much like Black Mamba (only some changes towards the end)
  5. "Himalaya Bahn" opened in 1983 (afaik) and is still touring the German fairs. In fact, after "Eurostar" has gone, it is the only big travelling coaster in Germany next to "Olympia Looping". The owner decided that he had to offer a big coaster for people who were not interested in loops, which were all the rage back then. The ride premiered after the Schwarzkopf double loops and one year before the amazing "Dreier Looping". The first drop is really intense for a family coaster and the the parabolic second hill offers wonderful airtime. There are some great laterals and heavy Gs. You can still feel that Stengel designed this before CAD took over.
  6. No, you´re right! "Looping" is a very awkward German movie that tried to be profound but turned out to be incredibly tacky. Not only does Shelley Winters ride the ride in the front row with her husband (it´s the opening ride after they saved their whole life to buy a rollercoaster) but (SPOILER) they both get shot in the head during the ride. To make it even better: The shots are in slow-motion and pretty graphic. There is also lots of strip-tease on the bumper cars by Sidney Rome. Well, it sounds much funnier than it actually is. Regarding the Katapult: Usually the ride would start out going slowly back and forth until it began to speed up dropping halfway out of the loop. The train would go through the loop three times forwards and then three times backwards. Occasionally the operator would accelerate the train out of the station and into the loop (sometimes even backwards). This was the most thrilling way to operate the ride, but it was done pretty rarely. I guess it was too expensive and put stress on the friction wheels.
  7. It´s called "Roller Coaster - Der Achterbahn-Designer Werner Stengel". Written by Klaus Schützmannsky, it appeared as a sort of "exhibition catalogue" to the Stengel exhibition which took place in the "Deutsches Technikmuseum" in Munich in 2001. It´s a sort of biography with lots of rare pictures, some technical sketches and some vague future-designs. Of interest is also the appendix which lists Stengels work up to 2000, complete with project number, commissioner, manufacturer and kind of work (dynamics, layout, design). There are also some works listed which never saw the light of day (eg. Bullet coaster by italian company SDC for Kings Dominion). Sadly the book doesn´t show pictures of those rides. Since the book was mainly done for the exhibition (it is a hardcover) it was presumably printed in relatively small numbers and was soon sold out. Amazon did promise re-issues and english translations, but they never materialized. You´ll find it on Ebay every now and then, but it isn´t cheap. Sorry, can´t scan from the book, since I am working away from home right now.
  8. Thanks for the great "Alpenflug" pictures. The first one was taken at Oktoberfest in Munich, the only fair the ride ever played. The coaster was so popular that the owner had to call in police to control the crowd of spectators and riders. Of course this was also a sure way to get some free press. I still remember that "Alpenflug" made huge waves in the news and in the papers. After all, the manufacturer MBB is/was a hi-tech weapon company with a very unpopular standing in postwar Germany. The coaster was the largest and most amazing (travelling) coaster the world had seen back then and when it was closed down and permanently dismantled due to its faulty fabrication, the publicity got even larger. The whole "Alpenflug" dilemma was certainly not the kind of publicity and image-change the dubious company had hoped for. The other pictures show the ride during construction on the MBB plant near Munich. That explains the unfinished IKEA look of the cars. It´s a pity that there are no more pictures which show the ride in fill swing. According to the Stengel book, every part was manufactured as a double. So the second coaster was actually already existing, but it was never assembled and probably ended up as some bombshell. Speaking of the Stengel book: There are some sketches of Big Bad Wolf from the Schwarzkopf-phase. They show a train of 4-person cars, which look almost identical to the Arrow-trains. There is a scene which shows the train racing through a "bob"-trough, with the track hidden in the theming. Then there is another scene in which the train is racing down a snowy hill, while "jumping" over a "bavarian" house, which is half sunken in the snow. Those sketches indicate that Schwarzkopf and most likely Busch Gardens were not planning to use those huge "Flugbahn" cars, nor the circular track that was originally designed for this attraction.
  9. The AquaTrax layout was the supposed ride that was set to go to Heide Park before it was decided that they build a Rita-Clone instead. Heide Park was actually advertising "Desert Race" with this layout. Their AquaTrax should have been built inside the Coloss area and was supposed to have many numerous contacts with water, which would have resulted in a sprays of water, equally simulated like on B&M´s dive-machines. Tussaud decided in the very last minute that the ride with its surrounding themeing would have been to expensive and went for the accelerator.
  10. Here is another one: The Coaster at PNE, Vancouver. The ride is just flat out amazing while the rest of the park is a really ugly funfair.
  11. This slide is actually not the one in Germany. It recently opened in Slowenia, which is close to the Austrian Border. There is a copyright battle going on at the very moment which is very interesting. The company that was supposed to build the first ever Looping waterslide for a German park (Austrian slide manufacturer Klarer) filed a patent for a real, almost 90° looping slide. However during testing it became evident that the proposed design was not ridable. Klarer then kept on changing the design until it resembled an overbanked turn. Meanwhile another Austrian slide manufacturer claims that he was developing this tilted looping slide (the one in the video) long before Klarer changed their full loop to this near identical design. The Klarer looping slide is supposed to open in Germany later this year. It won´t be the first looping slide anymore, but I think this claim is fishy anyway, since both designs are definately no loops.
  12. Thanks so much for posting these rare Arrow pictures. I couldn´t believe my eyes that they really believed in the suspended corkscrew! I am always torn between admiration and raising an eyebrow whith Arrow. They really had this can-do attitude and they must have been morally and financially depressed when so many of their ideas fell flat for various reasons.
  13. Concerning the Rainbow/UFO: Here is a picture of a ride called Taifun which was taken at the Expo in Brussels in 1958. This is the one with a 180° bow. It has only 6 cars and actually seems to have two loading stations. http://users.skynet.be/rentfarm/expo58/viewmaster/index_bestanden/page0084.htm I remember a ride called Super Passat, which was build by Heinz Fähtz. This was the one with the quarter bow. It used to play on German fairs during the 60s and 70s before the Enterprise made its debut. It is actually part of my earliest memories when I was two years old.
  14. I am pretty sure that "Das Monster" is not by Anton. I´d say it is from a dutch manufacturer. Antons Monsters had different and rotating gondolas. But the track-bound pirate ship is one of Antons answers to the Huss swinging ships. Does anyone know where this bizarre UFO ride came from? (That mini Enterprise that travels bothways on a semi-circular pole?) I remember seeing pictures of it in the seventies, but I never saw one in action.
  15. I am not sure if he really enjoyed it: It´s a bit painful to watch if you are not into S/M
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