Roller Coaster (Great Yarmouth Pleasure Beach)

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Roller coaster
Roller coaster
Data
Location Great Yarmouth Pleasure Beach
( Great Yarmouth )
Type Wood - sitting
category Scenic Railway
Drive type Chain lift
Designer Erich Heidrich
opening 1932
length 982.4 m
height 21 m
Max. gradient 35 °
Max. speed 72 km / h
Travel time 3:10 min
capacity 1080 people per hour
Trains 3 trains, 3 cars / train, 5 rows of seats / car, 2 seats / row of seats
Inversions no

The Roller Coaster , also known as the Scenic or Scenic Railway Roller Coaster , is a wooden roller coaster of the "Scenic Railway" type in Great Yarmouth Pleasure Beach in Great Yarmouth . The railway was built there in 1932 and has been in operation ever since. It is one of the last eight Scenic Railways in the world and the last in the UK. A special feature is the “brakeman” who moves along, who can reduce the speed at any time with a brake on the train instead of brakes installed on the track. It is also the second highest and second fastest wooden roller coaster in Great Britain.

The train

The structure of the track is made of fir and pine wood and is completely clad with painted metal plates. The route is also made of wood and has escape routes on both sides in the valleys. Although the track is often referred to as a side-friction rollercoaster , there are no side-friction wheels. Instead, the wheels are flanged like on a train, so the task of the brakeman sitting between the first two cars is to keep the speed low enough not to let the train jump out of sight when cornering.

The railway has two large slopes, the first of which leads through the supports of another section of the route.

history

The railway was originally built as the biggest attraction of the Paris colonial exhibition in 1929 by the German Erich Heidrich, who had previously built the Montaña Suiza in Donostia-San Sebastián in Basque , and operated by the showman Hugo Hans. After visiting the exhibition, the owner of Pleasure Beach in Great Yarmouth, Pat Collins, bought the train and then had it dismantled together with Harry and Edward Wadbrook and brought to England. After the parts arrived in February 1932, they were rebuilt there by a group of German workers on Pleasure Beach, so that they could open to visitors in April 1932.

Like the other Scenic Railways of the time, the Roller Coaster had a theming of plaster mountains on the sides of the wooden structure, as well as other design elements such as artificial locks.

At the beginning, the railway had five wooden trains, which were replaced in the 1960s with new ones made of fiberglass, which are still in use today. In the late 1960s, the theming was also renewed and the old plaster of paris was replaced by sheet metal painted with a mountain landscape. The roller coaster was later redesigned and since then has been driving over a light blue structure with a blue, red and white star band at the level of the track.

Pat Collin's brother John built a copy of the track in 1938, which opened in his Barry Island Pleasure Park in 1940 , where it was destroyed by a storm in 1973.

literature

  • Matt Crowther: The Scenic Railway: A Vanishing Breed. In: American Coaster Enthusiats (Ed.): Rollercoaster! Volume XXII, Issue 3, No. 77, Mission (Kansas) Spring 2001, ISSN  0896-7261 , pp. 12-25

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Side Friction Coasters. (No longer available online.) Rollercoastermayhem.com, archived from the original on September 29, 2010 ; Retrieved September 14, 2010 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.rollercoastermayhem.com
  2. ↑ Wooden roller coasters in Great Britain sorted by speed
  3. ↑ Wooden coasters in Great Britain sorted by height
  4. ^ The World's Fair; 70 Years on from the Beginning of an Era

Web links

Coordinates: 52 ° 35 ′ 34 ″  N , 1 ° 44 ′ 10 ″  E