Cedar Point retires Monster after 56 years

PR is hard. A park three hours away under the same ownership doing exactly what you said you can't do (refurbishing their Monster ride) makes it harder. :)

I don't see any claim of "can't." Just "won't."

And that could make sense at one park in a way that it does not make sense at the other.

I will miss it, but more because it was fun to watch vs. "I enjoyed riding it." I mean, I did enjoy it, but I skipped it more often than not.

That prediction/speculation guy on YouTube says that this is the beginning of removing and replacing Gemini. They could easily replace Gemini without removing Monster.

I am pretty sure that the Monster rides are expensive to maintain. And as most of us already know, Cedar Point have their ridership to cost ratios down to a science. Removing Monster can only mean that the ride did not give enough rides to justify the cost.

Kings Island's Monster must be more popular with guests. It is one of the original rides that opened with the park. Kings Island guests are kind of nerdy about the park's history. Maybe that's one reason it is still there.

Over on Pointbuzz, Rideman, Dave Althoff Jr., has a good explanation as to why CP’s Monster is different from the others and why they are out of options in terms of repair and re-welding.
Which is why KI’s Monster is getting a reprieve.

I'm not sure how different the CP Monster is from the one at KI, but CP's was one of the first four, and Kings Island's was the last one built. That means the sweeps on the CP machine are off from the ones at KI by about 6", but my guess is that the centers are about the same. Presumaably, Battech still makes and sells custom parts, although some of the parts are adapted from ancient Ford trucks. Battech presumably has the molds for those diffferentials, but having the molds to cast new parts, and being able to practically cast new parts are two different things.

That said, the Kangaroo has...or rather, had...a center based on an Eyerly Fly-O-Plane. Kennywood reimagined that ride, replacing the old Ford truck axles with a pair of variable frequency electric motors with planetary gearboxes, eliminating the countershaft, belts, and other hardware in that center. Of course, then they had Premier completely re-engineer and rebuild the thing. The Monster has a hydraulic drive to begin with, so a conversion to an electric drive would be relatively simple. That's not a terribly complex ride. Being able to maintain it is really a matter of will, more than anything else. But the Monster is also a particularly inefficient ride to operate just because it needs three stops to load; in fact with the reduced popularity of the ride, Cedar Point mostly operated using only 16 of the 24 tubs. I really like the Monster for a lot of reasons, but unfortunately I can also understand why it really should have been replaced about 30 years ago.

--Dave Althoff, Jr.