Eurostar - How bumpy may a coaster be?

Hi,

we had a fair here in Cologne and on it was the Eurostar coaster - a travelling inverted coaster that has lot of similarities with Batman-The Ride, except for a neat double corckscrew in the middle.
It's a Werner Stengel designed, Giovanola-built coaster with an excellent very compact layout with some really cool and well designed elements.
However, over the years it has become so bumpy that the ride beats you up as hell because the pieces of rail don't fit together anymore. In some places, I saw displacements of 1 cm or even more. The beating of the coaster made rattling noises you could hear in a wide range around the fair.
On the ride, it felt much more like a car crash than a smooth ride.

What can we do about this..? Now everyone in Cologne who rode this coaster must have bruises like me.
What a terrible experience it was, and it was hard to imagine what a wonderful ride this was when it was smooth.

*** This post was edited by superman on 11/12/2002. ***

Not go on fair rides?....

You actually rode that thing. I'm not sure that I would trust a portable coaster of that size.

I don't trust fair rides at all after my sister quit her job at a fair. Never the less the two recent Fabbri Booster accidents.

Why don't you people trust fair rides? They are regulated by the federal government, so they must be safe. I think thats why Ed Markey wants parks to be regulated by them to, to make them safe. ;)

In general, we have the TÜV check the rides on a fair before they are allowed to run when the fair starts. Even though I have not heard of a case where a fairground attraction was closed down or didn't get the OK to run, the TÜV receives respect and trust as an organization assuring the safety of the German fairs and technological appliances in Germany in general.
That's why I went on it.
I noticed the rail-displacements only afterwards.
I think this also taught me a better judgement of when or not to go on a fair at all.
Now that we have some cool coasters around, we are also lucky to be not as depending on the travelling coasters anymore here in Germany. Yet... the next cool inverted coasters are in England. Close to Cologne there's only Vekoma stuff that's almost as bumpy as the Eurostar.

What I enjoy (heartily) is that every year I get to ride the Zipper at the Puyallup fair.. a ride that was responsible, quite a number of years back, for a fatality. I always wonder what seat they sat in....

-----------------
www.tripowered.com - The future of music.

sorry, but this coaster was built (manufactured) by Intamin, not Giovannola

-----------------
Shaun Rajewski
Rctycoon2k
http://www.rctycoon2k.com

Rctycoon2k said:
"sorry, but this coaster was built (manufactured) by Intamin, not Giovannola

Sorry about that, I guess you're right, Giovanola obviously also was part of the deal though:

http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/town/lane/xxg01/coasterkingdom/html/eurostar_main.htm

*** This post was edited by superman on 11/12/2002. ***