Texas Giant testing video on Facebook

Count me in as someone who's now looking for ways to make the long haul from Ohio to Texas. Although I'll wait till people actually ride it before I jump.

The park is pretty nice if you've never been there. It has the "charm." And yes, there are plenty of hotels nearby, and Fort Worth.

Dear Kings Island, please do this to SOB. Thanks. :)

Dear Cedar Point, please do this to MS. Thanks. :)

Texas Giant looks really smooth, but I wonder if it will age well? Will those I-beams ever get pits or bumps in them? How easy will they be to replace once they do?

I'd love for them to take SoB, make the drop like 70*, then a double up and then over bank down into the rose bowl, then they can shorten the brake run, have a double down, add the loop back, overbank back up into the 2nd helix, reprofile the hill over the track for more airtime, 90* turn around, another hop, then back to the station.

LostKause said:
...I wonder if it will age well?

Probably no better or worse than any other steel coaster.

This is (was) a Dinn coaster, correct?

OhioStater said:
Fast? No doubt it looks like a blast, but it looked pretty slow to me. ? I'm not drinking, I swear...especially at the end of the clip...that's full speed?

I think most folks are impressed at how fast it was without a full-length train.

Exactly. Hence the comments about how fast it'd go with a fully loaded full sized train.

For it to only have 2 cars of the train on the track, I think it's going over the hills quite speedily.

Not sure what exactly happens with short-train coasters (thinking about AvancHellcat or whatever its called these days at the minigolf in the Dells, and about PNE Vancouver's Coaster)....they look and feel like they are FLYING through the course.

I understand in a general way how the physics works, and that longer trains should theoretically maintain momentum around the course better - so I think it's more of an illusory effect, but I'd love to have more rides run with "stubby" trains...I think I recall some of our discussions about that from 8-10 years ago, and the term we applied then was "cartoonishly fast". :)

That may be perception though. If you have a shorter train, you probably perceive that it's going fast than a longer train because it takes a train going the same speed less time to pass a point on the track.

In addition to the whole momentum thing, longer trains tend to ride more intensely at the ends because the front and back seats are farther from the center of mass and so the crest the extreme points on a hill at a faster velocity.

Andy's got it. In Dynamics, you treat the train as a "point mass" where the center of the mass (the point) is the average of the two ends and everything in between. The shorter the train, the more the ends act like the center of the train and vice-versa. A short three-car train can't have much variance in acceleration from end to end without tightening the curvature of the hills to make the train length "longer" relative to the curvature of the hills.

For example, if Millennium Force had a short train, the curvature of the first drop could be much tighter and still exert the same g-forces on the riders as it does now. If the train was any longer, the hill would have to be more drawn out than it is now to maintain the same g-forces.

darn! You beat me to it! I was going to say that they should do Mean Streak next, then I might want to pay to go there and ride it again.

Looks like the second hill is different than it was originally. But, that just makes it look more fun.

Awesome. This whole project has really fascinated me, and it's exciting to see it come closer and closer to opening.

Are all three trains on site, yet?

FWIW a couple of days ago I met a FT CP employee at a local watering hole who said MS was going to get the same makeover this year.

Roz

Don't bet on it.

That would be cool, but I'll wait until the announcement before I get excited.

I could see MS getting the Steel top layers but as far as reprofiling and spending another ten million. CF isn't going to do it unless they could market it as new, or biggest , fastest whatever

I see the topper track as a likely possibility for both of Cedar Fair's POS's.

"both"? What about the other one?

Oh, that's right, that one doesn't tear itself apart. That doesn't mean it isn't a POS. I mean, you don't get voted World's Worst Wooden Roller Coaster for fourteen straight years without being a POS.

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

It would be the coolest thing in the universe if SOB got this, and the loop was replaced! ...In the universe!

:)