Rollercoasters: into the dragon's lair

[GAcoaster]

From the Telegraph (UK):

 

Rollercoasters: into the dragon's lair

Rose George travels to the Swiss hideaway where the mightiest rollercoasters are made

 

Monthey, deep in the Swiss Alps

 

Hurtling, diving, spinning, turning, upside-down, back-to-front, terrifying, awful, breathtaking, blood-shifting, dizzying?… over. No one can really describe what it's like to ride a rollercoaster - beyond screaming, loudly - and that includes your correspondent. The 45 seconds it takes to ride Nemesis, Alton Towers' famed coaster, left me at a loss for balance as well as words, my blood having been shifted via inverted loops, corkscrews, Immelman turns and a cobra roll or two.

 

It had been decades since I'd ridden a rollercoaster. But that makes me unusual. In 2007, according to a report by the Themed Entertainment Association (TEA), 306.5 million people visited the top 40 theme parks in America and Europe - 4.6 per cent more people than the year before. Some of those will be going for the 'family-oriented entertainment'. But many will be going for the scream machines.

 

Since some enterprising Frenchman took a popular Russian pastime called an ice slide, and stuck a car with wheels on it, the rise of coasters has been steady and unrelenting.

 

The Parisian wheeled coasters of the 19th century were followed by America's first coaster, a coal-carrying train called the Mauch Chunk Switchback Railway, which was pressed into service in 1874 as passenger-carrying entertainment once the coal had run out.

 

Ten years later, an American businessman called LaMarcus Thompson installed the Gravity Pleasure Switchback at Coney Island; in England, Blackpool Pleasure Beach followed suit in 1891. There were troubles; the harsher loops of some rides caused serious back and neck injuries. Fatalities were common, but not apparently off-putting.

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The 1920s saw the coaster industry flourish, until the Second World War dampened it. The next big phase was the construction of steel coasters, which replaced the existing wooden tracks in the 1970s and haven't stopped since.

 

Today there are 2,159 coasters on the planet, according to the reputable Rollercoaster Database, and the industry is worth multi-millions. It has to be, because the coaster is often the most 'repeatable' ride in a park. Repeatability means people come back, and it is priceless.

 

'Rule number one of the theme park industry,' one of the TEA's authors said, 'is: Thou shalt reinvest.'

 

And the investment is considerable. Track Epcot at Orlando's Disney World cost $130 million, according to Charles Read of the news site Blooloop, while Disneyland's Space Mountain cost $90 million, although most of the money goes on theming (the average coaster costs $8 million).

 

By these standards, Nemesis was cheap at £10 million. Its statistics also pale alongside the record breakers. Forget the soaring loops or wooden tracks: Nemesis reaches no higher than the tree lines, and covers only 13,000sqm (the world's tallest coaster, Kingda Ka in New Jersey, catapults its riders 45 stories - 465 ft - into the heavens). The ride - excluding the climb to the first drop - lasts only 45 seconds, and its tracks and cars are steel and glass fibre. Also, it's 14 years old.

 

Nevertheless, coaster fans consistently rate Nemesis as the best ride in Britain. That's because it was made by Bolliger & Mabillard (B&M), a small Swiss firm reckoned to be the best rollercoaster manufacturers in the world.

 

Their rides, say fans, are smoother, better, supreme. They are booked up for years ahead and are so good, they don't need to advertise. And like the rest of this lucrative and secretive industry, they prefer to let the rides speak for them. Unless you ask nicely.

 

Bolliger & Mabillard's offices are in Monthey, a small, less than beautiful city on a plain between dramatic Alps and more dramatic Alps. It is flat, somewhat industrial and very Swiss. B&M moved into the ground floor apartment when the company was born, 20 years ago, and moved up. Now its offices are in every apartment except one. The top floor holds the artists. Beneath them are the structural engineers, then the mechanics, then on the ground floor, spare parts.

 

Walter Bolliger is a German-speaking Swiss who has lived in French-speaking territory for 20 years. He speaks careful English and is a careful man, with good reason. The coaster manufacturing industry is small, almost incestuous.

 

The best three companies - B&M, Intamin and Vekoma - are all based in northern Europe (Intamin in Liechstenstein; Vekoma in the Netherlands). There is intense competition and a fear of industrial espionage, so preparations have been made for my visit. I've been googled. The artistic areas - including Bolliger's office - will be out of bounds, and anything relating to ongoing projects has been removed.

 

Bolliger is unfailingly courteous, but steely. 'We have to respect our clients,' he says, when I ask him why he doesn't let the media in. 'We get a lot of requests and we make people mad by refusing them. But we enjoy what we do. We don't want to do anything else.' He means he doesn't want the distraction.

 

B&M, from its office layout to its coasters, is small, intense and dedicated. To design a coaster, says Bolliger, he starts with the basics. 'A large sheet of paper. No computer.' The design stage takes a month before the engineering begins. But even before the paper, there is the walk.

 

'We visit the parks and see the site. We talk to them about what they want, about who they're aiming at.' All of this is important. At Alton Towers, the height restrictions led B&M to design a coaster that would go down into canyons. 'We had to go underground, and that makes Nemesis unique.'

 

There are 69 B&M coasters in operation. Most rely on engineering and physics for their power. I tell Bolliger that I remember two things from my 45 seconds of Nemesis. First, the thought 'why is that water red?', as I hurtled along a few centimetres, it seemed, from a fake rock-face.

 

And second, that all that speed, force and sensation were achieved using only gravity. Other coasters use accelerators to drag their cars up to the first drop. B&M uses a simple chain-loop, and then the power of weight and nature. (The red water, by the way, is supposed to be blood and something to do with the mythological alien creature that is the rather naff theme of Nemesis.)

 

Bolliger learnt about this in his first job. A trained structural engineer, he began by working for a company that built pipelines to carry water down from mountains. At some point, the company was asked to build an amusement ride - a Swinging Ship - for Intamin, and then Bolliger thought he could do that himself, along with his then engineering partner, Claude Mabillard.

 

There was no training, because there was no such thing: you learnt on the job. These days, you might have a manual or two, but there's no university course in coaster design. Even so, Bolliger & Mabillard found that they were good at it. Their first coaster - Iron Wolf, in Chicago - was a success.

 

Their reputation was made, and then sealed, by invention. This is what Bolliger wants in an engineer: someone who can see that table-sized blank piece of paper and build a machine that makes joy. 'Someone who is creative.'

 

Someone like Bolliger, who read about a German fighter pilot called Max Immelman, who was known for a manoeuvre called the Immelman turn - a half-loop, a half-twist then a curve so that the car exits the manoeuvre in the opposite position from which it entered - and who thought that would work on a coaster. Bolliger doesn't fly, but he would like to. 'Isn't that the dream of every human, to be a flying man?'

 

In 1992, B&M installed the world's first inverted coaster at Six Flags Great America, for the Batman ride. With an inverted coaster, the platform drops away in the station and the riders' legs dangle free. They also make flying coasters, such as Alton Towers' Air, where the rider is tipped face-forwards, Superman-style. And then there's the vertical drop dive coaster, such as Oblivion, that shoots you downwards, dead straight, into a big, dark hole.

 

The nearest I get to Oblivion is a testing car at B&M's workshop in Fribourg, an hour's drive from Monthey. Coasters are usually built on-site in the autumn, in park down-time - July isn't a good month for car construction spotting. None the less, Eric Bera, an engineer, shows me a test car for the flying ride, all primary colours and electronics, with an emblem on its front wrapped in brown paper. 'We can't show you that,' he says. 'It's for a client.'

 

B&M is known for exacting engineering. Coaster enthusiasts like Rich Foster, chairman of the European Coaster Club, could tell a B&M ride blindfolded. They are the ones that stay smooth. 'There was a wooden coaster in Norway that was magnificent,' he says. 'Over 18 months, it turned into an absolute boneshaker.'

 

B&M calculates everything to a 16th of an inch. This is for smoothness - and safety. The first testers are the water dummies, somewhat human-shaped plastic containers filled with water, usually to an average weight of 75 kg, and sent on several hundred rides around the newly constructed track. (Manufacturers also usually have four larger-sized seats on a ride. These are tested for fit, says Bera, by recruiting larger-sized friends and relatives to sit in them. Fat people aren't easy to find in Switzerland.)

 

After that, it's the turn of the accelerator, a machine that records G-force and speed. The maximum G-force on Nemesis is 4Gs; the nearby ride Rita - Queen of Speed uses 4.7. In its brochure, Alton Towers boasts that Nemesis uses as much G-force as in a space shuttle launch, but this, says one B&M engineer, 'is probably advertising'. Anyway, it's not about quantity. 'If you jump up and down,' says Bera, doing just that, 'that might be a force of 10Gs. The problem is not the intensity, but the duration.'

 

To test the limits of what humans can take, B&M engineers must go on the centrifuge, a spinning machine placed on scrubby grass at the workshop. 'That really kills your day,' says Bera, looking green at the thought.

 

'Because we have to test to the limits of what is enjoyable, we have to go past those limits to understand what they are.'

 

The final ride testers, after the dummies and the accelerator, are humans. Walter Bolliger rides his own rides. After Oblivion opened, he brought the whole company of 31 people on a staff trip to London and Alton Towers.

 

Safety is a constant concern. Park lobby groups are fond of saying that it's more dangerous to drive to the park than to ride the coaster, but these are large and lethal machines.

 

Last month, a teenager who climbed a fence into a restricted area at the Six Flags Over Georgia Park was decapitated by a coaster car, and in 2007, a young woman called Kaitlyn Lasitter had her legs amputated at Six Flags Kentucky Kingdom when cables wrapped themselves around her, only 20ft up.

 

This incident inspired Congressman Ed Markey to launch a Bill calling for greater safety of amusement park fixed rides, which are exempt from oversight by the main consumer safety body in the States.

 

In 2002, doctors writing in the Annals of Emergency Medicine concluded that people ran a risk of an injury requiring medical attention once every 124,000 rides; while the risk of an injury needing hospital treatment was one in 150 million rides.

 

No one has ever had a serious or fatal accident on a B&M ride, Bolliger tells me, but things can happen. Rachael Lockitt, Alton Towers' PR, says staff have found prosthetic eyeballs in ponds near Nemesis, and artificial legs and arms have also flown off. They can be lethal projectiles; that's why filming the ride on camera phones is forbidden - the ride will be stopped and cameraphones removed.

 

Nemesis isn't actually that fast: its top speed is only 50 miles per hour, though it feels like 500. Its power lies in balance and intensity, in the choreography of force and speed. (One Alton Towers manager, I am told, had to lie on his office floor for four hours after going on Nemesis, before the world stopped spinning.)

 

Speed is essential, though humans can't perceive velocity, except when it changes. This is why we don't get thrilled by fast trains or planes, but a 300ft vertical drop exhilarates.

 

Anticipation is also crucial, which is why the queues at Nemesis pass under the ride, all the better to hear the screaming and see the dangling legs of riders. Fear is involved, though it comes from perceived and not real risk (ride safety campaigners would argue otherwise).

 

Last year, scientists at the University of Nottingham's Mixed Reality lab conducted experiments using physiological measuring equipment on riders of Oblivion at Alton Towers. They found that the highest level of arousal was at the head of the queue.

 

Novice riders showed mixed emotions - pleasure and displeasure - all the way round; experienced riders showed only pleasure. Physical sensations can be tamed, but only so far. Bera says he can have a conversation on a ride, though not the first time. I'm told that the famed coaster consultant John Wardley can give interviews on Nemesis, all the way round. Even upside down in an Immelman.

 

Such knowledge may underpin the next revolution of rollercoasters. They can't go much higher or much faster, and the human body can't take much more G-force. So interactivity is probably the next challenge. Already, Robocoaster, a robot arm that holds the car in its metal grasp, can be programmed according to the riders' preferences.

 

The fixed site rides in parks are more limited, so interactivity is being explored in other ways. On one coaster in Japan, riders get a choice of six music channels. B&M has just built the Led Zeppelin coaster for the Hard Rock Park in South Carolina, which plays Whole Lotta Love. ?The Six Flags Magic Mountain Park in Los Angeles has just unveiled its Fifth Dimension X2 coaster.

 

This cost $10 million to upgrade from X, which earned its Fourth Dimension label by having extra-wide cars with seats hanging free from the track, enabling them to rotate independently. The Fifth Dimension adds a sound and light experience. Even so, the 'woodies' - wooden coasters - continue to thrive. Some fans swear the creaking tracks and boneshaking make for a more terrified thrill.

 

As for Bolliger, the certainty is that he will continue to do what he does best, and remain the best. At the end of the day's visit, he draws a parabolic curve on a piece of paper to explain how he makes people float. It's about harnessing gravity and zero gravity to get a feeling of weightlessness. He is animated, unusually.

 

'For a few minutes,' he says, 'you are floating inside the restraint. People pay $20,000 to hire a plane to get the same result, but with a coaster you pay $20.'

 

I ask him if he considers himself an engineer or an artist. He thinks both. 'I think it is like a chef - is he a cook or an artist? I think he's an artist, too.' He is a balancer, of bolts and steel, but also of emotion. 'The media use the word "thrill ride", but I say I am in the amusement business.'

 

This is his goal. He points to a picture on the wall, a stock shot of people in a coaster car, their arms flying, their faces showing shock, awe and joy.

 

'That's what I want,' says this supremely careful engineer, who has given a couple of minutes of extreme enjoyment - 'terrifying, maybe, but enjoyable' - to millions of people.

 

'To see people smile. To see them go back for more. That is my job satisfaction.'

[southview2]

They should really check their sources, Kingda ka is not 14 years old....hahahaha...

[redsoxfan0810]

^ The Ka thing was just a short mention, then the 14 year old fact was continuing on about Nemesis.

 

This was a nice article! I bet that mystery flyer car was for Manta.

[southview2]

^ The Ka thing was just a short mention, then the 14 year old fact was continuing on about Nemesis.

 

This was a nice article! I bet that mystery flyer car was for Manta.

 

 

I think that picture is old. Ther paint sceme of the already done section is superman colors.

 

Edit: Take that back, I just reviewed the pic closer and in the backround are fin shaped fixtures. I agree with you.

Edited July 27, 2008 by southview2