Rampage at Alabama Adventure closed in 2024 for steel track conversion

I get kind of worried that traditional wood coasters are falling out of favor because of the required maintenance. I'm interested to see if The Gravity Group's fabricated, more durable, vertically laminated track helps with this. People have indicated that the Beast and Racer are tracking really well in their replaced sections. And isn't The Voyage getting some of that treatment?

I think Jeff hit the nail on the head with maintenance costs.

When I worked in theme parks, we operated a mid side woodie with a steal support and even with that, our annual maintenance costs were hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

It all adds up pretty quickly. We had several year round carpenters who did nothing but maintain the coaster. Annual track replacement, wood, hardware, capital repairs, new trains….and there’s a decent amount of liability risk from claims resulting from a rough coaster. Herniated discs can get very expensive and difficult to litigate/settle and/or defend.

It’s a huge expense on many levels in an industry that’s trying to shave down any operating cost possible.

Wood coasters are relatively inexpensive to build. It’s a reasonable building material compared to steel. But it’s come clear that in the long run wooden coasters are quite possibly the most expensive choice if maintained properly. It’s fair to say that the classic coasters of the golden age no longer possess much of their original wood, track, or bolts if any. It’s all gets replaced piece by piece over time.
I’ve been on a lot of crappy woodies and it’s easy to see what parks care for their rides and what parks throw the rides up and just let them run. That’s why knowledgeable enthusiasts flock to and acknowledge parks like Holiday World and Knoebel’s. They may not rush to build new expensive attractions but that's possibly explained if one considers the budget involved when they actually care for their star attractions. They get it.

I rode The Beast late last fall (nearly 2 operating seasons after the Gravity Group upgrade).

I chose the very last seat, over the wheel. Give me your worst, Beast.

The ride was outstanding. As smooth as I’ve ever ridden it (hundreds of laps going back to the ‘80s), and still the great sounds and feels that a real wooden should have. Plus a bonus airtime pop (before the midcourse tunnel) that was added just for fun.

Ditto experience on Racer. I’ve heard similar great reports of the “new” KD Grizzly.

So yeah, I’d love to see every struggling wooden coaster get the Gravity Group vertical laminated treatment, so my future grandkids can enjoy these classic wooden rides.

I guess I have just never seen an actual $$ figure before, but $500,000 per year just to maintain?

And no, I'm not doubting it; it's just a much bigger amount than I would have guessed. I can ditto the Beast and Racers experience.

Some of this is relative to size, too. There are a lot of older wood coasters that aren't very tall, and they go on for decades. Heck, I did Rutschebanen at Tivoli, and it's over a hundred years old. Runs like a champ even with the manual brake operator. But certainly at some size, the format just doesn't age well. Even something more moderate like Blue Streak, I doubt that thing has the maintenance budget of a ride that's even 30 feet taller. (And it's obvious that their retracking efforts are definitely not annual, at least, not in a thorough way.)

Rides like Mystic Timbers also still run as well as they did the year they opened. Not sure how much that is size and how much is good maintenance. Because I also remember how amazing Villain was at Six Flags Ohio in 2000/2001 and how absolutely unrideable it became in later years, even after some work had been done on it.

I'm pretty sure that was just outright neglect. Nostalgia seems to interfere with some memories about how poorly Dipper and Bobs ran as well toward the end of the Six Flags era. They were a little better when Cedar Fair took over, but not by much.

The high yearly cost for Rampage has to come from the lack of maintenance that ride received for awhile. I have to think that if you keep up from the start, it isn't as costly than neglecting and having to catch up. That coaster was not maintained to the standard that I am sure the Koch family has for wooden coasters.

I think there is another piece to this. While labor costs are definitely a factor, I've also got to believe that a lack of skilled carpenters and the insurance companies also play a part. In terms of skilled carpenters, there just are not as many as there used to be, which makes them even more expensive from a labor standpoint and that much harder to find. It's also not necessarily pure carpentry - it's pretty specialized. Also, couple that with the insurance aspects (i.e. think of Son of Beast's failure at KI or El Toro's multiple failures at Great Adventure) and I have to wonder if the insurance companies are starting to balk at the risk of insuring wooden coasters. Yes, there obviously are cases like Fury 325 where something fails on a steel coaster, but from a structure standpoint, I've got to believe the insurance more concerned with wood than steel.

I'm shocked to hear it costs $500,000 to keep Rampage going. Like OhioStater said, this is the first time I've seen a number placed on the cost to maintain a roller coaster before.

But I also wonder what shape this coaster was in before it shut down for three years. I doubt that it was maintained in the three years it was down too. Trying to bring something like that to lift will be costly by itself. I wonder what the cost is for a well maintained woodie.

I think that most customers don’t care about the track type as long as the ride isn’t rough. The steel track accomplishes that better with less maintenance, so this will probably trend more that direction.

It”s better to have these coasters saved with steel track than demolished. As long as the structure is wood it at least provides the same eye appeal and atmosphere.

Racer used to give a terribly rough ride. After getting the new track, the ride has a much longer line than it used to. It's a great ride now.

Same with Beast. I was starting to feel old, partly because I could barely tolerate Beast anymore. Then the retrack- And it once again became one of my favorite coasters of all time again. Me third or forth ride on it when I was a kid, it was sprinkling, and the track was oily. The train didn't roll through the track, it slid through. It was awesome. The retrack reminds me of that ride.

Rampage has always looked like a lot of fun, but I kept hearing about how rough it was. I'm glad it's getting some care. Maybe I'll get there to ride it someday.

I wonder if there’s really that big of a difference between wood and steel coaster maintenance costs. At Winter Chillout a few years ago, there were hundreds of welding flags on Raptor and Corkscrew, and according to staff there at the time, it’s like that every year. I could see the cost to inspect and weld defects on Cedar Point’s steel coasters being equivalent to the salary and benefits of small crew of full-time carpenters.

In my experience working at Six Flags Over Texas in the early 90s, the difference with in season maintenance on wood vs. steel coasters wasn’t even close. Texas Giant would have a half dozen carpenters crawling all over it for 4 hours every morning we were open. This was on top of a mechanic and fiberglass tech inspecting trains and an electronics guy cycling the ride at some point. Steel coasters would have the same minus the carpenters. It wasn’t really even close to the amount of resources. The off season was similar in that several carpenters spent the bulk of that time working on the ride. In at least one year, Texas Giant closed during the holiday event to get a jump on off season work and it reopened late another year.

And to someone’s point above, scale matters. Judge Roy Scream in the same park received probably half of the effort of the larger coaster.