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"Someday, Mr. Spackman will get his 'family' coaster..."
I pulled in at Indiana Beach shortly after the place opened, crossed the suspension bridge to the island, paid my general admission fee, then went down the ramp and bought my ride pass for the early ride session. I figured by only buying the early session I'd be assured of getting out early enough to get home...yes, home...at a decent hour.
My primary objective for this trip, of course, was to ride the new coaster. There is absolutely no doubt about it...while the Superstition Mountain ride was a powered "not coaster" ride, the ride that replaced it...the Lost Coaster of Superstition Mountain (better known to r.r-c as "LoCoSuMo") is absolutely positively a roller coaster. And it was my first stop of the day, just as crews were waking it up.
The area around LoCoSuMo still looks very much unfinished. An unshaded queue made up of pipes and string gives us a place to stand and wait. The queueing space is kind of jammed in between the LoCoSuMo station and the Boat Tag game. Before long the strange little cars start moving on the ride, and people start boarding. Laminated signs warn that this is an extremely violent ride. Finally it was my turn to be the fourth person in one of the tiny cars.
Each train has two small cars, each car seats four people. Loading is complicated a bit by the netting stretched over the cars. The door opens outward, and the outboard half of the lap bar pivots upward. A lightweight metal roll-cage supports the netting, which includes a piece attached between the top of the roll bar and the outer end of the lap bar. Four riders crawl in, two facing in each direction. Fastening the retracting seat belt was a bit of a challenge because the buckle is buried deep in the back of the seat cushion at the center of the seat. The lap bar drops down and engages with the car door. I mentioned the seat cushion...that's something this car has plenty of. There are at least 4" of padding under, behind, and on either side of the seats. There is so much cushioning in this train it makes the Leap the Dips train seem skimpy by comparison.
A look at the bottom of the train is also instructive. Each car has four road wheels, four up-stop wheels, and eight guide wheels...one in each of the conventional locations, plus additional guide wheels ahead of the front road wheels and behind the rear road wheels. The wheel assemblies are mounted on semi-independent yaw pivots, held in place with tie rods running across the width of the car. The chassis on this thing is not a whole lot unlike the design B&M use on their steel coasters. When a coaster car is designed by a mechanical engineer, it sure looks different!
That difference becomes obvious almost immediately as the train drops out of the station and rolls around an impossibly tight curve and into the elevator. Some 40' later, the train rolls forward and the real fun begins. The ride starts by circling the top of the elevator, then doubling back and rolling across the front of the mountain. The ride has almost no straight track on it, as it bounces up and down and navigates impossibly tight curves. How tight? I swear, without the netting, riders in the back seat of the back car could probably slap hands with the front seat riders in the lead car without too much trouble. The really neat thing was how the train negotiated this torturous course very smoothly. The cars bounce around a lot, but that's because the track bounces around a lot. Then near the end of the ride, the train comes to a full stop, then races down a double-dip and around a few wicked curves in a breakneck race to the station. LoCoSuMo is as advertised a very aggressive ride. But it isn't a rough ride, so much. The one problem I had with it was that as the car went through dips and curves, the ride forces would force me down and back in the seat, which would compress the seat cushions, which would allow the seat belt to retract further to the point of becoming uncomfortably snug. Apart from that, I found LoCoSuMo to be a delightfully odd ride, and a perfect fit for delightfully odd Indiana Beach.
But of course, LoCoSuMo is not the only significant ride at this unusual peninsula park. I headed on down to the mainland and climbed the stairs to the Hoosier Hurricane. There, I boarded the white train, which I noticed has been updated with individual seat belts, though it still has the traditional single-position lap bars. Last time I rode the Hurricane, it was a disappointingly bland coaster, perhaps finally the "family coaster" Mr. Spackman keeps trying to build at Indiana Beach. You can imagine, then, that I was entirely unprepared for the wild ride I got this time around. I don't know what they've done to the Hoosier Hurricane, but it was running smoother and faster than ever, much more like I remember from the ACE Spring Con back when the Hurricane was a new ride. It ran like a new coaster, rivalling even Shivering Timbers for the sheer amount of airtime offered. Wow! Hoosier Hurricane is a fantastic ride again!
Just as I got off, the ride was shut down. The crowd was rapidly growing, and without any comment, the park shut the ride down to add the second train. I get the impression that they don't frequently run the second train on the Hurricane, but when the park gets busy they don't hesitate to get it out and run it. But that takes time, time that I spent crossing the midway and going up another stairway to ride Cornball Express.
Cornball Express was, of course, the surprise smash hit coaster of 2001. It was Tom Spackman's second attempt to get CCI to build a mild, family coaster, and once again CCI delivered with a wild, family coaster "perhaps for the Addams family," as Denise Dinn-Larrick put it. Cornball rocketed into a lot of top-10 lists very quickly among coaster nuts, and after my experience with it last season, I headed straight for the back of the train. When I got there, I spotted a familiar face. Remember Wolf, the guy who spent his summer working in Kansas, who lives in Michigan, who I finally met a couple of days ago in Iowa? It was him! In Indiana! I guess we were sort of chasing each other across the Midwest. I joined him for a back-seat ride on Cornball Express. The ride did not disappoint. We managed a first-drop duel with the flume ride (though we just escaped getting wet) and then things got wild through the giant loop around...er...above the kiddie rides. In particular it has this double-drop-like thing that is a lot like the spot Dave Sandborg talks about on the Skyliner, where you are simultaneously thrown in four directions at once. It makes for an absolutely out-of-control moment, and though much of Cornball is a minimum of 20' off the ground, it's still a very low ride compared to its lift hill, so it's a short, snappy ride, and really aggressive. It's got a couple of airtime moments that can inspire genuine fear. Family coaster, indeed!
The Hurricane still wasn't running so we (remember, I just joined Wolf) opted for Tig'rrr instead, the park's Schwarzkopf Jet Star. As usual, Indiana Beach deserves recognition for (a) operating a Jet Star, (b) operating a Jet Star with no mid-course braking, and (c) operating a Jet Star with no added rider restraints. It's not a combination you see very often. Add to that the fact that this Jet Star is sitting on top of a restaurant and completely surrounded by Cornball Express just adds to the atmosphere that makes it Indiana Beach.
Wolf had not yet ridden the Hurricane so we headed in that direction. I think he was as surprised as I had been at the ride's performance this season. We rode in the red train, which, I noted, still has the shared seat belts in it. There are a number of little things about the red train that make it seem like it just doesn't get the use that the white train gets. Red train, white train, it doesn't matter, the Hurricane is still flying this year.
The other wild ride at Indiana Beach is their Double Shot. It's right at the edge of the peninsula and has some neat views of Lake Schafer. This thing distills the roller coasters down to the most basic element: a crushing positive-G launch followed by extreme airtime at the top of the tower as you get blasted back down. Like Hurricane and Cornball, the Double Shot features insane airtime. Unlike Hurricane and Cornball, the Double Shot has shoulder bars on it, which means that insane airtime comes at a price of sore shoulders.
A ride on the apparently-Hopkins-built Sky Ride yields some interesting views of the demented trackwork of LoCoSuMo. Which was our next target. This time I rode in the lead car of the other train. There, I noted that my concern had been addressed, as the retracting seat belt had been replaced with an adjustable, non-retracting model. As I suspected, it made for a more pleasant ride. On my second ride I noticed things I hadn't on my first ride because I was too busy holding on. For instance the maintenance man standing next to the track at the mid-course brake, or the third train parked on a storage track located behind the lift elevator on the station level. I commented to Wolf that they did have a third train on the ride, but I wasn't sure at the time whether it was clear to him that I was referring to the third LoCoSuMo train, not to the animated locomotive which is supposed to pop out at the end of the ride. 8-)
Again, Lost Coaster is so different from any other coaster that it is a near-perfect fit for Indiana Beach, even if it isn't quite the family ride the park keeps asking for. But given the comments I've heard from others about the ride, I wonder if I am the only coaster nut who actually likes the thing. Then too, perhaps I am also the only coaster nut who doesn't insist on waving his arms in the air like a maniac on the thing. LoCoSuMo is a wild ride, and you've got to respect that!
We wandered the park, rode the Galaxi, and rode the Hurricane and Cornball some more. As usual, Indiana Beach proved to have some of the least-competent bumper car drivers I have ever seen anywhere, drivers who managed somehow to get the entire set of cars hopelessly jammed up on nearly every cycle. It's a big rectangular "go clockwise" ride with a center barrier with openings big enough to squeeze a bumpr car through, so when the floor got jammed up in the one corner, those of us who knew what we were doing could slip through the barrier and attempt to bump the stuck cars loose at the front of the jam. Or at least continue driving around in a somewhat smaller circle in the clear part of the floor.
Finally, the time approached for my ride pass to expire, so I took leave of Indiana Beach. I had about a four-hour drive to get home, plus there is a time-change (NOT in my favor), plus I wanted to stop, if only briefly, at the Indiana State Fair in Indianapolis on my way home.
--Dave Althoff, Jr.
Next: Paramount's Kings Island (#7: Phantom Theater tour)
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