Voyage trims question

^Just because I'd like to see something happen doesn't mean that I think I know Voyage better than HW or Gravity Group. But has the ride experience always been as violent as it has been recently?

I know Voyage is an extremely intense ride, but can anybody who has ridden it recently and at other times tell me how it has aged in recent years?

The ride has been kicking peoples' asses since the day it opened. It's actually better than it was, and the minor slowing is a welcome reprieve. You know they rebuilt the entire turnaround, right?

^I know the turnaround has been overhauled and reprofiled in a major way, so I've heard of that. I can see it, because the turnaround seems smoother than the similarly twisted "weaving" section.

I don't recall which year that they rebuilt the spaghetti bowl. But the previous season was brutal! I couldn't handle 20 rides without taking a break!

That off-season, Dan Koch stated, "Most coasters get some TLC in the off-season. This year, Voyage is getting the spa treatment". Indeed it did, as it was a major improvement. Since then, every winter, Voyage is getting large sections of track replaced.

I won't get the chance to ride it this year. But, last year, I felt it has run better than it ever has!

Kudos to HW for taking such great care of their rides!

I don't think I could handle 20 rides on any ride without taking a break.

I could take about 3-4 rides on Voyage before starting to develop a slight headache. Not anything severe, but noticeable - I rarely get headaches from rides.

I do agree that the turnaround is much more bearable than the weaving section. Both are quite violent, but the weaving section just seems to rattle you more harshly.

The bumpiness on Voyage is extreme, but not the "painful" type of bumpiness. Some woodies I've been on might not be as bumpy, but every bump is painful. Voyage isn't like that. Voyage rattles you harshly, but not painfully, and does so for long stretches.

(I'm not insulting the ride, by the way. It's definitely one of my favorite traditional woodies, if not my favorite traditional woodie.)

GigaG said:

I know Voyage is an extremely intense ride, but can anybody who has ridden it recently and at other times tell me how it has aged in recent years?

I'm not an engineer, nor do I work at/for the park, nor does any of that matter, because, yes, I have ridden the ride a lot in the past, and I just rode it July 4th weekend (just after a storm, no less). I wish they'd go back to the longer trains, but I don't think it needs new trains. Having said that, and having ridden Voyage pre and post-turnaround rebuild (Right after, actually), I can say that, yes, the ride could use some more retracking. Was it intense a few weeks ago? Yes. And It was (still) amazing. But it was definitely rougher than it has been in the past. Totally noticeable. Best rides I've ever had were after the rebuild. And I'm not someone who thinks I know better than people that work on the ride, I'm just able to tell the difference between a smoother ride in the past vs. now.

And I know the difference between intensity and roughness.

I could take about 3-4 rides on Voyage before starting to develop a slight headache. Not anything severe, but noticeable

Thats just typical Voyage. I've rarely ever been able to ride more than 2-3 times in a row. In 2012, right after it had been smoothed out, with weather perfect at about 65*, I was able to ride several times in a row, but still I couldn't marathon.

My wife can only handle a couple of laps on Voyage, then she moves over to Raven to spend her time (if it's ERT). I am a gluten for punishment! I like to see what my body can handle (45 now). It's always a personal thing for me. After an entire day of marathoning Voyage, I couldn't take more the next day. I felt the loose screws rolling around upstairs! The second night of ERT I camped out on Thunderhead. Much easier!

I miss not making it there this year. Hopefully things are better next year and I can return!

CoffinBoy said:

I am a gluten for punishment!

I imagine the celiac disease folks should stay away from you.

I imagine some sort of S&M involving a variety of breads when I read that.

Don't make me use this baguette on your backside!

Last time I was at Holiday World, for an ACE event, I left bruised from all my consecutive rides on Voyage. Bruised and happy :-)

I felt like the post-triple drop section was bumpier than the turnaround. There's also a pretty big "pothole" right before you go into the turnaround.

I wonder whether Voyage would be smoother with GCI Millenium Flyers. Yes, the ride is pretty beat-up as a result of the sheer craziness of the layout and the effects of PTC trains, but I wonder if newer, articulated trains would just simply ride better than the current PTCs.

(Yes, I know the Timberliners were a failure, but those were prototypes.)

Just mbout anything is more accommodating than those PTCs.

^True. I have to wonder whether Voyage was built with the expectation of getting the trains replaced, with the PTCs being temporary (an expectation that obviously fell through with the Timberliner attempt.)

On another note, how much worse is Hades 360 than Voyage? I rode Hades in ~2008 (as a rather young kid) and it was quite bumpy, and my mom absolutely hated the thing.

But noticing how violently bumpy Voyage is (not "painful" at once, but enough to jostle you a lot), my friend pointed out "How much bumpier could Hades be to put it at the opposite end of the Mitch Hawker poll?" He has a point - while Hades doesn't have quite as good of a layout as Voyage, surely that's not enough to make Hades one of the worst woodies ever while Voyage can easily stay in top ten lists despite being rough. Can anybody shed some light on this?

(Or is Hades 360 more accurately represented by the 30-40ish "Hades" in the Mitch poll and not the rock-bottom Hades 360, which seems to be an oversight?)

^Full disclosure, I have not ridden Hades 360.

However, I have ridden Hades and visited Mt. Olympus and that park in my personal opinion, sucks. I mention this because while Im sure we would all like to think we are impartial in ranking rides, we aren't and are influenced by the experience we have at the park as a whole. With few exceptions, my top 10 list is all at parks that I have really enjoyed, and rides associated with my younger years especially, are ranked much higher on my list then they should objectively be. I think its safe to say that most of us really enjoy going to Holiday World.

That said, there have been few rides where I feel overcome by Joy but yet cant process what I just experienced sitting on the brake run on my first ride, but the Voyage is the only ride that gives me that feeling every time I ride it. The combination of the amazing floater air on the way out, followed by the pure insanity that occurs after the first tunnel will be hard to beat. The ride is extremely unique, and I doubt a ride will ever be built that will rival it. When I rode it not long after it was built I felt I had found a co #1 wood coaster (along with the Beast) but as the ride has aged and gotten a bit more bumpy, its now solidly in my #2.

No one ever said Timberliners were a failure. The park just said they decided not to go with them.

I love Hades with them.

The fact that converting Hades to Hades 360 caused it to drop from ~#30 in the Mitch poll to a bottom 10 wooden coaster shows that the poll is broken. For rides that are new or are obscure, I think how the coaster was performing on a given day that enthusiast groups visited reflects on its ranking too much. There's simply no way that Hades 360 is worse than coasters like the wooden kiddie coasters at the former Paramount parks.

I wonder if the disparity in rank is because a good number of people rode it in its original form, when it was new, and ranked it high; then after it went all to hell (haha get it) because it wasn't maintained, and they added the 360, it didn't fare so well in the polls?

Having said all that, I always thought this coaster looked incredible. The tunnel under the parking lot, coming back above ground for the turnaround/inversion, it is just such a unique layout. Sorry to hear it rides so crappy.

Well, when I rode the Voyage at HoliWood Nights in 2015, I concluded that the way the trim brake was implemented was brain-dead stupid. The ride was timed from the top of the lift hill to the brake trigger point, and if the run time was below some arbitrary value, the brake was closed and held closed for a fixed length of time bearing no resemblance to the variation in speed. This brought the train to a full stop with all the subtlety of Kool-Aid Man himself. It absolutely destroyed the pacing on the triple-down, and caused the train to run *too slowly* through much of the return run...the most obvious place was the final 90-degree banked turn, where the train was moving so slowly that there was a noticeable lateral jolt in the last car because the train couldn't stay stuck to the upper rail.

I wouldn't say that the ride was "shpxvat ruined", but elements of it...mostly the triple-down...certainly were. Worse, everything after that screwed-up turn was bouncing and shuffling like mad in the last car, meaning the end of the ride was actually made worse, and I feared the ride would do worse damage to itself than when it was running full-bore.

In 2016, the park remembered to disable the trims during HoliWood Nights ERT. But when it wasn't ERT, the brake was operating, and I was pleased to note that its operation had been greatly improved. It seemed to be more responsive to the train speed, did not hold the train as it did in 2015, and seemed to allow for a slightly faster run than in 2015. It was most definitely an improvement.

I'm still not convinced that using the mid-course in this fashion is the best way to solve a problem with the ride. It's simple and expedient. But I am not convinced it is the best technique. I'm not sure where the trouble spot is, but there are a couple of places where a proper trim brake could be positioned that would do less damage to the pacing on the ride. Of course, it's also possible that there are structural or other mechanical solutions that might be under examination that might allow the park to once again stop trimming the ride, allowing it to operate 'as (previously) advertised'.

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

Tekwardo said:

No one ever said Timberliners were a failure. The park just said they decided not to go with them.

I don't know what the monetary investment was between GG and Holiday World (I assume it was significant) but I wouldn't call a testing period that long, only to not use the Timberliners and go back to PTCs, a success.