Arrow suspended coaster marketing video

That should be rephrased as *some* TOGO rides. One or two of them in Japan were B&M smooth, believe it or not. If RCDB didn't say they were TOGO I'd never have believed it.

Great video! The cheesy late 70's music was perfect! :)

^ I agree. I wonder why they never went to production on the corkscrew aspect?

The cheesy late 70's music was actually used up till the late 90's in england on Grandstand on the BBC.

Don't know if it has a name.

Sorry to go off topic- it just came to me.

I am also curious why no other park retrofitted their arrow suspended coasters with the vekoma trains, other than Cheesington. Clearance issues perhaps??

I wonder why they never went to production on the corkscrew aspect?

Are you serious? Freely swinging cars + inversions = many, many problems.

Yeah Moosh I was cringing when I watched it. Sorry I didn't make my sarcasm a little more obvious.

lol...no worries ;)

Looks like it is going through that corkscrew dangerously fast.

I found it interesting that the prototype used Intamin style track. I've never seen that on an Arrow design before, and I wonder if the Bat would have had less track issues if that track would have made it into production.

^ I'm guessing even if it didn't have any track issues the stress on the trains (and from the looks of that full scale model also the necks of riders) would have been way too much of an issue to make it beneficial to operate it.

PKI really likes getting wacky new rides and having them not work after a season or 4

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Mamoosh said:
Um, BATWING...Arrow used to be based in the SF Bay Area. The full-scale model in the video was built at that facility...hence Jomo's comment.

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Ahh yes,Arrow was orginally based in Mountain view CA. prior to the move to Clearfield Utah.

I took Jomo's post to mean that they'd sold a ride to a park in NorCal somewhere,rather than building the full scale prototype for testing purposes.

The "real" first suspended coaster "Alpenflug" used exactly that 4-beam track. It just ran for 10 days and had to be scrapped after its first play at Munichs Oktoberfest in 1974. The track was not banked and the forces destroyed the whole structure. Alledgedly the people were mad about the ride.

Stengel was involved in the early design stages but withdrew his name and work after his warnings about the high forces were not heard by the manufacturer (evil weapon and aviation factory Messerschmitt, who wanted to do somthing "funny" to get a better public image)

I guess if the internet would have been around back then the people at Arrow would have heard WHY the Alpenflug was such a disaster and made changes to the design.

You can see a bunch of pictures of it here:

http://metamorph.coaster.net/alpenflugGF.html

I think it looked pretty large and fun.

^Nice find Kitsch!!!

The thing I don't get is why they didn't try to 'bank' the track some from the get-go. I am somewhat suprised that the engineers didn't say at some point that the banking would allow the ride to be more stable.

Have computers made some of this stuff so 'common-sensical' today that it wasn't that obvious 30 years ago?

The corkscrew was an accident waiting to happen. I'm glad it was never built.

...still waiting for a scan of the full size corskrew prototype...

^^ I agree, that idea sounds like a guaranteed disaster, and I deifnitely wouldn't need a computer to convince me otherwise. Heavy cars negotiating a corkscrew inversion that aren't rigidly attached to the chassis? Put that in the "What the hell were they thinking? category.

I don't believe there was ever a full scale corkscrew prototype, I think it was killed after that small model.

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SVLFever said: I am somewhat suprised that the engineers didn't say at some point that the banking would allow the ride to be more stable.

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"Surprised" is putting it mildly...LOL...and I am NO engineer... ;)
*** Edited 11/16/2006 7:09:19 PM UTC by rollergator***

Corkscrew part of the suspended killed after safety issues. you can goto Coaster Fanatics website and goto Video section I have posted a Arrow Prom. video from my collection of the Bat.http://www.coasterfanatics.com/sec_videos/default.asp *** Edited 11/16/2006 5:52:47 PM UTC by cycloneriders*** *** Edited 11/16/2006 5:53:35 PM UTC by cycloneriders*** *** Edited 11/16/2006 5:54:19 PM UTC by cycloneriders***

That is a great promo vid for the Bat. I still think that the Bat had the coolest trains ever!

Yeah, they were pretty cool. Chessington should have purchased the molds for them!