Coaster Walkers: Inspectors must have strong legs and sharp eyes

[GAcoaster]

Picture and story from The Washington Post:

 

Rob Lattin (left) and Sean Garrison inspect the Wild One, a 90-year-old wooden roller coaster at Six Flags America in Prince Georges County, Md.

 

Coaster Walkers: Inspectors must have strong legs and sharp eyes

 

By Darragh Johnson

THE WASHINGTON POST

 

WASHINGTON - Every morning at dawn, he’s out there.

 

They all are.

 

The roller-coaster walkers.

 

All across the country, where there’s a wooden coaster, walkers such as Tony Zelko at Six Flags America are climbing the descents, rounding the curves and double-checking every wooden plank and every nut, bolt and bit of rail.

 

The job is a throwback and a workout - “think of a StairMaster on steroids,” said Zelko, the director of maintenance and construction at the park in suburban Prince George’s County, Md. And it can be a daily meditation - “the Tao of maintenance,” he said.

 

“It’s like a big spider web, and we crawl around in it,” said Rob Lattin, 28, who has been coaster walking at the amusement park for eight years. “We’re the spiders.”

 

He had just climbed down from the Wild One, a 90-year-old wooden coaster that stretches through much of the park. It looked as languidly elegant as an old, white Adirondack chair, although its finicky personality and the shifting temperaments of wood require daily ministrations.

 

“This is what started the whole thing,” Lattin said of the Wild One, gesturing at the park around him - at the lurching architectural swoops and the speeds that make steel coasters scream like fighter jets.

 

Without wooden coasters, Lattin said, the amusement parks of today would not have developed around them, with such rides as the Joker’s Jinx (zero to 60 in three seconds) and the stomach-levitating elevator drop in the Tower of Doom (140 feet down).

 

“Steel - the computer tells you everything you need to know,” said Lattin’s coaster partner, Sean Garrison, 23, who has only recently begun walking the rides. “But wood,” he said, personifying the material, as though he were apprenticed to it - “I’m learning from Rob and from the coaster itself.”

 

Lattin is a carpenter from a long line of tradesmen. His grandfather was an ironworker and boilermaker, his two uncles were boilermakers and carpenters, and his cousin is a carpenter. The family’s history reflects some of the tradition of the wooden coasters.

 

“Ain’t nothing like getting out there and working with your own hands,” Lattin said. “It’s pride.”

 

More caretaker than carpenter - although at many amusement parks, “carpenter” is the official title - the coaster walker is a throwback to a simpler time, when coasters were regal fixtures of the amusement park landscape, all white latticework and rattle and shake.

 

“It’s almost a living, breathing thing,” Zelko said, walking behind the Wild One. At night, when the wooden slats light up, “it looks like the Coliseum from Gladiator.”

 

Abruptly, he catches himself. Did he say that wooden coasters are almost a living, breathing thing? They are living, breathing things. Wood breathes. And wooden coasters have their own “character and personality,” he said. Their own moods.

 

Such as the way, in the mornings, they run slower than in the afternoons, after the grease has heated up and thinned out. And how, after a rain, the ride is slicker and faster, until the droplets dry, and it slows again. Wooden coasters talk. They shudder and sway - chilling particulars that make the ride seem that much more rickety but are actually what keep it safe.

 

“If it doesn’t shake,” wooden-coaster wisdom goes, “it’s gonna break.”

 

But that doesn’t mean wooden coasters are all romance, poetry and picturesque beauty.

 

“Wood coasters are trouble,” said Zelko, the same Zelko who calls them “great” and says that “they’re so much better than the steel coasters.” But, he said, “I spend less on maintenance on a steel coaster.”

 

Ultimately, he said, the difference between wood and steel is “the difference between riding a Maserati vs. a ’57 Chevy.”

 

Wooden coasters can be cantankerous. Just ask Brad Sumser, 32, who works at the “Roller Coaster Capital of the World”: Cedar Point Amusement Park, on a Lake Erie peninsula in Ohio. For a decade, he has been walking the Mean Streak.

 

“Its personality is mean,” he said. “They could not have named that ride any better.” It climbs almost 16 stories, dips, then ascends a 12-story hill. It stretches for more than a mile. One lesson that Sumser has learned from the coaster is this: “Hard work.”

 

It’s a familiar story.

 

At Six Flags in Prince George’s, Lattin and Garrison lugged about 60 pounds of tools and equipment in harnesses hanging from their shoulders. Big wrenches clanged as they walked. As they scaled each hill early in the morning before the park opens, the sun rising pink, then the sky turning blue, the stage that is Six Flags prepared for another performance.

 

Below the coaster walkers, lawn mowers whirred and two guys with a growling power-washer sprayed a walkway near Skull Mountain. A garbage truck rumbled by, and soon, the other coasters - the steel coasters - were sending out empty trains to test the tracks. The Superman’s chain hooks were releasing, and the carts were shooting down the hills.

 

By 8:30 a.m., ride operators had started arriving for work. “What ride you got today?” they taunted and bragged. “You got a Flat ride? I got a Roller Coaster.”

 

Lattin and Garrison were sweating. Their fingernails were rimmed with black; dirt covered their forearms.

 

Still, said Sean Strahl, 24, a coaster walker at Holiday World in Santa Claus, Ind., “in the mornings we come in, and there’s really nobody else here. And we’re out walking in the woods. And it’s quiet.”

 

There is, in the grueling demands of coaster walking, a certain freedom. A certain spirit.

 

Not that this is always foremost in a coaster walker’s consciousness. “Some days, you don’t soak it up,” said Sumser, the Mean Streak walker from Ohio. “It gets to be an everyday thing, and no matter how beautiful the view or how fun it seems - it’s work. That ride is brutal.

 

“But then other days,” he said, “you just kind of get caught by it.”

 

The Mean Streak sits where Lake Erie meets Sandusky Bay. It is perfectly positioned for him to “smell bacon cooking from the campgrounds. And sunlight’s out on the bay, and boats are going out, and people are starting to water ski.”

 

Some days, Sumser said, “you can see all the way to Canada from the top of that ride ... and you think: That’s a pretty good office view.”

[redsoxfan0810]

Very cool article, nice find. Walking a ride is something that always intrigued me, and I've always wanted to do it. It seems like quite the workout!

[GAcoaster]

It's funny, I can ride any height coaster with no fear, but if you asked me to walk it, I'd be crapping bricks.

[redsoxfan0810]

^ You're not alone, I would certainly be a bit nervous. I do enjoy heights a bit though.

[GAcoaster]

I have a weird thing about heights. If I had to stand on top of Kingda Ka I'd be fine. If I have to stand on the top floor of a mall and look down to the level below I get vertigo...

[redsoxfan0810]

^ Me too! The thing is looking straight down, that'd make my knees wobble!

[KK 10-7]

Eh, it's not THAT bad IMO. Walking up a steel coaster isn't to bad, but wooden. Forget it. I would be calling for my mommy. Haha. Although my biggest dream which will never happen is to scale Ka, like rock climbing just up Kingda Ka.

[Thrill-Pics]

When Kingda Ka was being inspected, I once saw someone not only at the top, but they were litteraly hanging by a rope inspectiong the L-shaped support below the track!!!

[Great Adventurer]

There is a youtube video of a ride inspector walking around on the top of Kingda Ka.

 

 

Also, is there any way to link the youtube videos directly to the post? Thanks!

 

[WesternCablesRule]

You cannot pay me enough after watching that video!