Coasters you wish you had the chance to ride

I rode SOB for only the second time ever early in the season, and it still beat the crap out of me. I like the term "jackhammer" when describing the SOB ride experience. I wanted to give it a second chance since I rode it the year it first opened, and now i regret it. OUCH! :)

The odd thing to me is that the ride had a long line and seemed very popular.

I'll never forget one year at KI's Pride Night, when SOB was fairly new, I got some friends on it and since we sat in the "recommended seat" we got along ok. But the odd thing was listening to the comments from the riders, ranging from "awesome" to "that was the best ride ever" - stuff like that. I just shook my head, and still do when I see the line of people waiting.

Well SOB is looking more & more like a problem child. The ride is down and many people have been speculating that it will be down for the season.

My DD10 had agreed to ride it this Sunday. I doubt that she will be upset that it is down. Maybe we can get her on Vortex instead. She doesn't like inversions though.

So did anyone here actually ride SOB when it had the loop? I didn't even realize that it had been removed. Anyone mind sharing how it was with and without the loop?

I rode it when it had the loop during it's opening year. It was a horrible ride. The original trains shuffled and jackhammered through the entire ride except one place: the loop. I vowed never to ride it again.

The ironic thing about removing the loop is that the smoothest part of the original ride is now gone.

I rode it with the loop. I have no desire to try it without.

SOB - now with all of the suck and none of the fun.

I rode it with the loop and it left grapefruit sized welts in both my thighs, I vowed to never ride it again.

Once the trains were changed out, I rode it again and it has decreased to about slightly less then Mean Streak roughness. The only thing worth riding it for now is that sweet first drop the rest is pretty boring. Its worth a ride if the wait is <30 min.

SOB stole my slogan!

I was going to leave a comment in the KD 2010 coaster thread about Moosh being a "fun sucker", but come on... they can't all be that easy! ;)

Carrie - Get up to speed. I'm a "fun-sucking know-it-all douchebag."

Would you quit giving stuff like that away? Some of us would like to be surprised when we find out for ourselves!

Ooooh...nicely played, kpjb ;)

About SOB, what everyone else said. I rode it near the beginning of it's first season, vowed to never ride it again. I passed it up on many, many visits to the park. They then removed the loop and pretended that it was fixed. Upon reading many positive reports here on CoasterBuzz, I decided to give it another try last month. While it didn't bruise my knees and jackhammer my spine, causing sever pain and fear of major injury like before, I still found it to be the most uncomfortable, painful coaster i have ever been on.

Mean Streak is bumpy, but not nearly as painful as SOB. I can tolerate, even enjoy, rough coasters. SOB is simply unrideable to me. I wish KI would chop it up and sell it for firewood.

On the other hand, there was a long line for the thing, much longer than most of the other rides. Most of the riders exiting the platform seemed to enjoy the coaster. My cousin Chase made it his last ride of the night, after 2 rides on it already. he said that it was his favorite ride in the park; better than Dimondback and The Beast...lol

If they tear the thing down tomorrow, it would become legandary as a fantastically violent and exilerating ride, and in a decade people would be talking about how they wished that they could have just one ride on Son of Beast to satisfy their morbid curiosity.

Are we twins separated at birth?

Regulus said:
I sometime wonder how we'd rank the so-called "Traver Triplets" IF they were still in operation today. Would they SMOKE today's Modern Coasters such as the ones at Holiday World, Silverwood, or Big Chief's Mt. Olympus. or would we ranking them alongside such Gems as Beech Bend's Looping Star or any of those "Hang and Bang" SLCs made by a certain Manufacturer?:(

I sometimes wonder.

Excellent point. My take on it is that they would not smoke the best of today's rides at least in terms of a ranking in Mitch Hawkers poll or whatever. But my reason for saying this has little to do whether these rides were good - I'm quite sure some of them were excellent, but far more that *preferences* for what enthusiasts like has changed quite a bit over the years.

Many (many) years ago during the first year or two of the Riverside Cyclone, back when it ran with PTC 3 benchers with the shoulder belts and all of that, long before the current reprofiling and the rest, it was, as anyone who was around then can attest to, quite an intense, violent ride, but more in the old school "set up" style; it wasn't fast paced with continuous flow like the more modern rides, it had slow spots and dead spots interspersed with small sections of extreme forces and quite a bit of old school violence. Back then many of us (myself included) could look past the less exciting parts of the ride and enjoyed the anticipation of the extreme sections, which trust me, were far more extreme than anything currently operating today. However, these days tastes have changed - and I'm not so sure a pure "set up" old school violent ride would be found that enjoyable by most of todays enthusiast population; today most folks I know, including myself, tend to prefer a ride with less dead spots and more of a flow - while there are obviously differences between the grade and intensity of forces we as enthusiasts like (I lean strongly towards the Gravity Group approach to forces, others the opposite and more to the GCI school of thought, for example), I think there is a common like of a well paced ride without a lot of dead space. The older rides didn't have so much of that, so I'm not sure they would be accepted as well - even today if the Riverside and Texas Cyclones of 1984, say, were around and in the exact same condition, I don't think either of them would be remotely near the consensus top five in the polls, even though of course there would be those of us who would still rank them fairly highly. (I'm fairly certain that if they were, even as much as I loved the early day TX Cyclone which was my #1 for many years, that neither of Bill Cobbs great cyclones would be in the top 3 today, and I like very aggressive, powerful rides)

As an aside, when I was starting out my coaster hobby in '84, and riding Riverside, there were still a few "old timers" who had ridden the Traver Rides. Not enough to make a statistically valid study by any means, but a few; and a lot of these guys said that the Riverside Cyclone of that day was every bit in the same league as the Traver rides or the Aeroplane in terms of intensity. While possibly there might be sections of the old school 1920's rides that were more forceful, I think if we look what's happened to the old school violent rides and where they rank, we'd see that many of the classic rides wouldn't rank as highly as some might think.

That being said, I wish we could find out - while my own tastes have definitely changed a bit in 25 years, I missed out on the Idora Wildcat (by a frickin year), the Ocean View skyrocket, the Cascade Comet in PA (of which I recently heard a well travelled enthusiast state that the "drop" everyone talks about on that ride was the best ejector air he ever felt) and many others, and I would have liked to be on them just for memories sake.

-m

^^^^very well written,I agree with what you said.

The Idora Wildcat was very intense and rough,one of the few I couldnt ride two times in a row.

The Cascade Comet ranks up there with the Williams Grove Cyclone of rides that I had fear when riding,not so much of the nature of the ride but the condition.I do agree with the comment of the last drop of the Cascade Comet,that was the best ejector air I ever had.

You agree with Moosh's post, "Ooooh...nicely played, kpjb ;) "?

That doesn't make any sense at all.

Maybe I don't know how this arrow thing works. If there are four arrows, then you move up four posts to see what the post is referring to, right?

Or do we count the post with the arrows as one, making it that he agrees with my post and thinks that my post was very well written? (Thanks, X Ride Op, if that's the case.)

You should say the persons name in which you are replying to. We are having a conversation. I'm old and get confused to easily. :)

I wish Jeff would add a new rule to the TOS; no arrows.

Sorry for the interruption.

Not that my opinion is worth much, but I think that carrots actually have their utility. It is simply another way of referring to previous discussion. The more ways a mode of communication has to accomplish the same thing the richer and deeper it is.

I do think carrots are ridiculously overused. If people would just exercise self-restraint and use them sparingly, they would be effective without hurting the eyes or the brain.

Oh, and if I could pick one coaster I never got a chance to ride, it would probably be the Riverview Bobs.

Of course we all are listing rides local to us, so I would say I wish I could have ridden the Flying Turns and Comet at Forest Park Highlands and the other coasters at pre-Six Flags Over Mid-America parks in the St. Louis area.

That being said, I lament EVERY SINGLE COASTER that has been demolished without my having been able to ride. Every book I read or movie clip I see of a coaster that has been removed before I was able to ride has me longing to be able to time travel back and ride them all. I think most enthusiasts feel that way, especially about rides that were closed with little or no warning (specifically Geauga Lake's rides in the recent past.)

[url][url]Your opinion ^^ means everything to us, Mike :)

I started to post a comment, then wondered about the spelling/usage of the word. So I went to Google and typed in "carrot vs carat" and guess what came up? An article written by Kirk Mahoney Ph.D. entitled “carat” vs. “caret” vs. “carrot” vs. “karat” ! And this is what I found:

“caret” — spelled C-A-R-E-T — means a proofreader’s mark (^) made in written or printed matter to indicate where something is missing. The noun “caret” is the third-person, singular form of the Latin verb “carere”, which means to lack, so there is lacking is the literal meaning of “caret” in Latin

So. I guess we're all wrong. Now I'll assume that since we all type on computers now and running thread commentary like this is a relatively new invention, that the caret can be useful in other ways. And, after all, as technology advances new definitions for words spring up all the time. So I agree, Mike, it's a handy reference tool to use when pin pointing a particular post, and is more specific than just mentioning someone's line name. And until I'm told directly not to use it, I think I'll continue.

I'm afraid to look thru my previous posts to see if I'm guilty of caret-ing (new word- see?) the post immediately above, which I agree probably isn't necessary. Don't want the Caret Police to come get me!

I've also forgotten what my original comment was. Something to to with roller coasters...