Crystal Beach Cyclone
rentzy387 said:
The Crystal Beach Cyclone was EXTREME. If it was still running it would not be the tallest or the fastest, but it would be the most infamous. NOTHING can ever be built to match the intensity the Crystal Beach Cyclone provided. There was always a nurse and first aid statoin at the exit and more people came to watch the coaster than ride it. That is what eventually led to it's downfall. People died often from this ride. Maybe it's because the first drop was banked at 85 degrees! Anyway, I'm glad the Comet was made after the Cyclone was taken down. The Comet is an AWSOME ride and if you ever get a chance to go to Lake George, go to the Great Escape and ride The Comet!
The Revere Lightning could be considered just as extreme and if not more dangerous.
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Lake Compounce-So Fresh and So Clean Clean
Enthusiasts today simply aren't into the kind of forces that the older style coasters put on people, that's why you've seen the Gerstlauers taken off Legend and all manner of complaints about LoCo since it started operating.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again, anyone who wants to ride a Harry Traver ride should go to IB and ride the Lost Coaster before it gets reprofiled this winter...that coaster is far and away the most intense coaster operating today, very sharp changes of direction, particularly at the bottom of drops, and it offers no quarter.
For the true insane experience ride it backwards in the back car, there's nothing else even remotely close to it for insanity IMHO, and that includes my favourite, the Legend.
I taped some of the shows on the travel channel this week and one talked a lot about woodies. It talked about Tonerre de Zeus, Zeus at Big Chiefs, had a night ride on Lakeside Cyclone, and many others. ( Sorry about the long expalnation about the show.)
In the show it went through the history of coasters and then went into talking about the comet and it's history. The show featured writers and editors from inside track magazine and they provided the informaton. The coaster was redesigned by Robert Shmeck.Then it was sold to the Great escape for 200 thousand dollars. Also featured in the show was the John Collins the GM at the Great escape and he confirmed this information. Needless to say the Comet is partly the Cyclone.
The show was called Travel to the edge: Wild Rides
2Hostyl said:
"People died often from this ride"? Oh give me a freaking break! I'd be suprised if even a handfull of people died on the ride. But yeah, it wasnt profitable so that's why it closed...Moreover, if it was actually running today, you'd hear whiny-pissy so-called enthusiasts complaing that it is "too rough" anyway. It's only because so few people have ridden it that it became Legendary (see Drachen Fire).
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Glad to see I am not the only one who believes in this "Drachen Fire Syndrome."
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Kind of hard to take a post as objective if a park or coaster name is part of the "user name"
Mr.Freeze 979: Sorry, but I would hardly state that the Cyclone still runs in the form of the Comet.
The Cyclone was basically "demolished" (at the very least "torn down"). The Crystal Beach Comet was a Herb Schemeck design. While it was built on the same location and using some of the steel from the old Cyclone, I believe the similarities end there. The basic structure of the Cyclone died when it was "torn down" (not renovated, not refurbished, not reprofiled, but torn down) with some of the steel finding it s way into the Comet as a cost saving measure.
IF this makes the Comet and the Cyclone the same, then it must mean that my refridgerator is a 1975 Buick (or what ever make of car the recycled steel came from).
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Kind of hard to take a post as objective if a park or coaster name is part of the "user name"
Don't forget it was a Schmek and Allen design. I'm also working on an ACCURATE recreation of it in NL. One person died on the ride when going up the lift he tried to standup and take his jacket off. He got stuck and couldn't sit down. Then while traveling down the hill he was ejected 90 to his death. (I've been doing a lot of research about this coaster)
The death was never proved to have been due to the riders fault or the coaster, only speculated in a lawsuit brought up by the family of the deceased. It was ruled as follows....:
The administrator of the suit brought against CAC, ltd. (the owners of the coaster) stated that ultimately, the failure of the lap bar was the cause. Amos Weidrich, the deceased, was thrown out when the safety bar came open at the apex of the lift. He fell to the bottom where the was caught by the train and dragged 200 feet. His clothes were stripped off, with the exception of his necktie, and his body was horribly damage, as his legs were cut off, as well as he was decapitated. Many eyewitnesses saw his body fly through the air, but assumed, wrongly, that it was an overcoat, hence the jacket story. Another man testified that he had sat in the same car as the deceased prior on 4 different occasions, and that the safety bar had come loose on his trips as well.
That is the real story. Again, you can get much more information by reading books written specifically on the subject. Yes, the Traver book is out of print, and yes, it's super expensive, but you can find it at rare book stores.
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www.tripowered.com
I never said they were the same I just said that parts of the cyclone including the entire lift hill and other parts were used in the new design. The park wanted to keep part of the ride but they knew that they needed to design a ride that was safer and more rider friendly. So in a way part of the cyclone still exists. But yes it is basically a different coaster.
*** This post was edited by Mr. Freeze 979 on 8/26/2002. ***
PkI FaNaTiC said:
Don't forget it was a Schmek and Allen design.
WTF? CBC was a Harry Traver design.
With all due respect to Richard Munch there are a great many mistakes in the Traver book. I find it extremely interesting that it is cited on this forum as a definitive work. Rich was the first one to collect so many photos of Traver coasters but he lacked documentation to confirm some of the claims made for several of them. The real value of his book is the appearance of many of these coasters to the general public for the first time.
There were four Traver Cyclones including virtual clones at Palisades, Revere and Crystal Beach which all opened in 1927. The Zip at Oaks Park in Portland was similar but considerably smaller. Three of these coasters were torn down near the end of the depression in '33 '34 because of lack of ridership and the Crystal Beach Cyclone was dismantled immediately at the end of World War II. The significance of this is that the park could not afford such a large coaster to operate with business having returned at the end of the war with so little ridership. In '29 Palisades was actually running a promotion that offered a prize to anyone who rode their Cyclone twice in succession. Of course this was hyperbole but yet it underscored the fact that the ride (s) were so rough that few people went on them more than once. Film of two of the rides show them to be very slow cresting hills while very rough in their descent through turns. The deaths were real but not the nurse. This was a marketing ploy to help "sell" the ride to the public at a time when a real coaster "war" was going on with progressively more extreme coasters each year. Consider just how much the design and thrill of a roller coaster advanced in a five year span from 1922 to 1927. From a coaster called the Limit at Coney Island which was 60' high to a proposal to enlarge the Coney Island Cyclone to 125 feet by Irving Rosenthal for the '28 season. In '25 the Thunderbolt was designed so well that when the first train ran it was far too fast for the circuit and the coaster had to literally be lengthened to accommodate the excess speed. The result is that part of the coaster was built over the Brighton Beach Hotel with steel girders rising from rooms within the hotel to support the track. This was NOT a science then. Fred Church, John Miller, Schmeck did wonderful work. But not everyone.
The Cyclones went too far and were not, overall, good rides. Portions of them were extreme but rideable and genuinely thrilling. Other portions were just plain painful. An analogy would be the Idora Park Wildcat in the years before it was torn down-it was virtually unrideable.
Don't discount the Coney Island Cyclone which is the coaster that every other was measured against. Perhaps only the Aeroplane at Rye Playland truly exceeded it in thrills. When the Cyclone operates after major track work this is still one of the finest and most thrilling rides on the face of the earth. When several years pass without work it is one of the roughest and most painful, especially in the back seat.
Traver was a builder. He built many of Fred Church's designs for a number of years. As for his own designs after these four coasters he didn't design another until 1937 and then it was a family coaster. His rides were not a success not even by coaster enthusiasts' standards. They were a genuine attempt to take roller coaster thrills to an absolute limit.a He just didn't know how to design this.
rentzy387 said:
"Actually a lot more of the cyclone was put into the Comet than you think. Most of the steel from the Cyclone is now part of ther Comet and a lot of the wood was also re-used. The designers didn't make a new coaster, they took down the old one and made a different design."
That's truer that you even realize. Actual section of the steel networking was placed into sections of the COMET coaster to save on the cost of rebuilding. I have seen actual footage (not on TV) of a person, whom I now know personally, walking the track of the COMET when it was at Crystal Beach and he points out areas of the Cyclone that were "placed" into position of the COMET.
If you look really good at the lattice work of the COMET at Great Escape, you can still see the same holes that were used to bolt the Cyclone together.
And although the wood that now exists on the COMET at GE is all new (it rotted when it sat at Martin's Fantasy Island, Grand Island, New York), some of the wood was reused on the COMET when they moved & rebuilt the coasterat Crystal Beach.
Technically, they did use the same lift hill, but the placement of the COMET at Crystal Beach was not the same site of the Cyclone. They moved the COMET to the breakwall of Lake Erie approx. 400 feet from the original site. That breakwall was once used for patrons to walk along while visiting the Crystal Ballroom; they no longer could use it after the COMET was built.
Here's an interesting arcticle on the CBC; http://www.coasterglobe.com/features/lostlegends-crystalbeachcyclone/index.cfm
I didn't know there were two other near identical coasters built at the same time. CyCLONE was sure a fitting name. ;)
IMO, legends are best left alone & trying to recreate them may only destroy them.
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