Six Flags Great America seeks permission to build wood roller coaster

SFGA, facebook page says look Aug 29 for a GIANT announcement? Like Texas Giant???

The Park asked the zoning commisions to built in the old Iron Wolf area.

You don't need to post the same comments in both threads.

The Gurnee Planning & Zoning Board has approved the request. The request will now go to the Village Board for final approval. The ride will feature a 165ft chain lift, with the first drop that goes about 12-14ft below grade.

ENUFFZNUFF said:

SFGA, facebook page says look Aug 29 for a GIANT announcement? Like Texas Giant???

They probably wouldn't expect the average person to connect the New Texas Giant to anything happening in suburban Chicago. It's more likely that the announcement is lower-case giant, as in large from their perspective.

SFGAm Shock Wave said:

The ride will feature a 165ft chain lift, with the first drop that goes about 12-14ft below grade.

This underground part would make it 3 feet taller than El Toro, and thus, a nearly negligible amount faster. Probably enough for the record though, if the drop is steeper.

EDIT: I just had to retype the whole second part of this post because of the quotation glitch. Can this please be fixed? It's really obnoxious.

Layout:

http://img600.imageshack.us/img600/862/09iv.jpg

Some more notes from the meeting now that I've had some sleep. The ride is short, I'd guess very similar in length to Outlaw Run. In addition to an overhead view of the track layout, they also had a height plan which showed 6 "hills". I put hills in quotes because as it is merely a height graph, it is unknown which of these are hills and which may be inversions. The heights are as previously stated 165ft lift with a drop going about 13ft below grade. Whether this will be a tunnel or just a trench is unknown. The remaining heights are approximately 120ft, 59ft (AIRTIME :) ), 105ft (the top view makes it look like this may be an immelmann/dive loop), 80ft, 65ft (this one has 2 65ft peaks, with a slightly lower spot in the middle, maybe a double barrel roll), and then 55ft at the beginning of the downhill brake run.

OK, these loopy-twisty flinty-flying wooden/ish coasters need to stop. I'm sorry, but I think it's out of hand.

1 or 3 of them is cool, because it's unique, and something we haven't seen before, but this is just ridiculous.

What's with the part circled in blue? What kind of funky element looks like that from above? Like an Immelman-y loop and twist sort of piece thingy...

short coasters suck, ugg send it back to the planning stage .. booo

Wow. A snapshot of a blueprint with some red marker, and already SFGAm's 2014 coaster sucks. Is that a record? Probably not, but it is pretty impressive.

Oh! Maybe that's the world record being broken! The first coaster ever to suck before construction even begins.

Not quite. Some enthusiasts were already complaining about the new Bat at Kings Island before it ever wasn't going to be built.

At least this is going to be a new coaster! There were rumors that they were going to bastardize one side of American Eagle with a Rocky Mountain treatment. Glad to hear they are leaving that great ride the same!

ENUFFZNUFF said:

short coasters suck, ugg send it back to the planning stage .. booo

Seriously? It looks like it's going to be very comparable in size to Viper. How can you complain?

If you want some size perspective, here's a blueprint overlay.

any clues who is going to build it?

Six Flags Great America.

So where's the decoy announcement site? I thought this type of information getting out was going make me wait until next year to visit or help out the other competitive park in Chicago.

No?

~Rob

https://www.facebook.com/groups/107558986001842/permalink/497409707016766/

Prediction, 8/20 @ 9:42AM: 165' tall, 12'-15' tunnel to just nip El Toro's speed record.

I know they have publicly stated it's a wooden coaster, but that overhead layout reminds me of what you'd see on a 4D layout. The other thing that looks odd are those circles- I'm assuming those are footers. Seems somewhat sparse for a traditional wooden support structure.

Those circles are the old footers from Iron Wolf. They also left the old station on the drawing, I'm assuming as a reference point. You can see the new station outlined in blue.