Pre-fab Wood Track - Retracking?

Zingo said:There are several large wood coasters, which don't have a good reputation because of the roughness of the ride, or because the parks have trimmed or reprofiled the thrill out of those rides in order to save the coaster from tearing itself apart. These coasters come to mind: Rattler, SOB, Mean Streak, Texas Giant.Would it be possible to retrack these coaster with the prefab wood track that is being used in the industry today? Do you think this would bring those coasters back as a signature ride for the parks?

Absolutely not! Not without the trains being replaced as well that can negotiate and not tear up the new track. Put PTC's or Premiers on the Intamin track and it will tear up almost as fast as the traditional layered wood.Thats my view of whats bing done to Texas Giant. Intamin trains and track. Would GCII MFlyers or TGGs new trains work? As long as the guaging was correct. I don't see why not. Their fully articulated.

New trains can be designed easily enough. But, it seems to me that it'd be a lot of work to convert a non-pre-fab into a pre-fab. I guess it depends on how detailed the original drawings were and and how hard it would be to create a prefab piece if the drawings aren't detailed enough.

I really don't care what they do.........if only they can bring back those original rides from 1990.....one can only dream.

I just found it interesting that we had already discussed the possibility of replacing the track of TG with plug and play track back in 2005.

New trains can be designed easily enough.

Is that so? What company is going to do it?

One interested in making money and staying in business?

New trains? I can name you two companies that have designs for fully articulated wood coaster trains. And I am willing to bet that one of them is probably supplying the new trains for the Giant. I even have an idea which one, but it is only a theory at this point. I wonder if there's any way I could find out for sure.....

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

The reason why all the prefab track is made in Germany is because Stengel's engineering office invented and patented the track and gave the contract to build it to a german company Helzbau Cordes. Intamin in this case is the vendor and they provide the trains and mechanical parts. The main concern with those rides is the insane cost! A friend told me that when Liseberg went with the prefab woodie for Balder, GCI supposedly joked to the park they could build them 2-3 equivalent wooden coasters for the same price!

A small park in Germany last year wanted a new wooden coaster, but since its a tiny park, they could not afford the Intamin-Cordes-Stengel "prefab" woodie, so they got Stengel to design a family friendly layout and Cordes to build a traditional woodie structure. Regarding the trains and mechanical parts, Gerstlauer was picked. While the layout is boring and forceless, Gerstlauer finally got the trains right! Instead of sitting on bricks, you got soft padding and they finally got rid of those horrible U bars, going with a nice L bar.