With no raptors built last year, one ground up and one conversion, which coasters are you hoping for RMC to look at for next year? I don’t have high hopes for RMC/Boss with Selim but, I can only hope. It’s so rough even with the trackwork that gets done on it. I think it has the potential to be the best RMC conversion yet. Or do y’all think titan track would be a better route? I’m also hoping for a park to get a custom/terrain raptor but ehh.
I can’t comment on Boss specifically since I haven’t rode it but I’d much rather parks let RMCs build new ground up coasters and actually put the effort into the wooden coasters (or call in Gravity Group). Just the examples of Grizzly at KD and Beast at KI show just how much magic they have when it comes to fixing wooden coasters.
Unrelated, seeing Mr. Freeze in that picture makes me so nostalgic for Batman and Robin.
Yeah I get the sentiment. But if you rode the boss you’d understand (maybe…lol) American thunder is fantastic and screaming eagle fills the historic woodie checkbox. But the boss, with the gerstlauer trains is just awful. And I mean the park tries, you can see lots of the valleys have been retracked like this year. Regardless it feels like a losing battle. Like the last double up, from where they removed the helix, feels like in snowboarding/skiing where you “hit the knuckle”.
Like the end of the ride feels pretty similar to this:
https://youtu.be/EHGqETZlv-E
No matter how bad a wooden coaster is it can be fixed if done properly. There are some pretty terrible coasters that would be extremely good if fixed correctly. I personally think that we have so few examples of properly maintained wooden coasters that the majority of riders have (understandable) reactions that there’s no hope.
I also have another fear… I think the I-box conversions are kicking the can down the road. The thing about I-box is that even if the structure is struggling the ride still feels smooth because the steel rails cover for the imperfections in the structure. Watching parks cop out by reusing the same wood is troubling because that wooden structure still needs to be maintained. SteVe has made this obvious (as has Lightning Rod which wasn’t even used wood) because of all the structural problems both coasters have had. Maybe they can skirt around more stuff because the ride remains smoother but they still need to maintain that structure despite being told that the end result is an easy to maintain steel coaster.
To be clear, I’m not saying that parks are necessarily running unsafe coasters - I just don’t think the long term plan is as viable as people think. It seems that RMC (and others) might be learning what Gravity Group (and GCI and a few others) realized long ago… Use a steel structure for better maintenance reduction but when it comes to wooden conversions that’s not an option.
Also one less thing I want to be clear about… I don’t categorically hate RMC… They make insanely good rides. I just often think that they sell parks an easy button that encourages chain parks to slack off on proper wooden coaster maintenance because when it gets beyond a certain point they can just “RMC it” … But I also do recognize that there are cases where a coaster was going to be destroyed regardless so this is a metric that’s hard to judge but you had to admit is there.