Trip Report: Cedar Point (01)
Sandusky, Ohio - 05/09/2004

"This one is gonna be a rough ride..."

It was just a little after 10:00 when I arrived. I had planned on the detour on OH-4, but some of the signage on the alternate route I was taking is just a little ambiguous, and when the sign in question says "DO NOT ENTER" I don't like to argue. I think the sign applied to the cross-street, but I couldn't be sure, so I ended up shifting my route in an unambiguous direction. Unambiguous, but it cost me a few minutes.

Cedar Point's $145,000,000 new attraction this season is...er...Geauga Lake. That, and a bunch of resort expansions that us "locals" probably won't even notice. So it stands to reason that with no major new attraction inside the park, the park should look a lot like it did last November, right?

Wrong.

This year the park has undergone some of the most extensive renovation that I have seen in years. You know how when parks say they are focusing their capital budget on "cosmetic improvements" it is usually code for "we're not getting anything at all"? That's not the case this year at Cedar Point.

The obvious changes started before I got into the park. There are a couple of new directional signs on the perimeter road, and most important the Gemini parking lot has been reconfigured, and landscaping has been added between the parking lot and the perimeter road. I think some parking spaces may have been lost, but it looks a lot better, and they have eliminated the center spaces where mis-parked cars made it difficult to back out. The new trees will ultimately be nice, and the lot looks much better.

My first stop of the day was, surprise, surprise, Magnum XL-200. Magnum has a reputation for getting the season off to a slow start...but not this season! Magnum was flying right from the start. Perhaps it's the good weather we've been having. I took a half-dozen walk-on rides, mostly in my favorite seat. I decided that in honor of Magnum's fifteen years of operation I should try to take 15 rides, but I also decided not to take them all at once. After all, I'd been in the park for about forty minutes and still hadn't set foot past the Magnum entrance!

Well, I corrected that little misstep. Dragster was running rather strangely. At the entrance, a bunch of people would enter the queue, then the entrance host would shut it down for a while, then a bunch more people would be let in. It turns out that the ride was running in much the same way. One of Cedar Point's long-standing queue management tricks is to not let people enter the ride queue when the ride is shut down. Well, Dragster was running in yo-yo mode, running great for a while, shutting down for ten or fifteen minutes, then opening back up. It was launching more consistently than on most days last season, but it often took a long time to get things moving. I decided I could wait and ride later in the season.

There was almost no wait, so I rode Wildcat, and noticed that the exit platform operator had to pull the car down to the unload point. I wonder if that has something to do with the fact that the ride was down later in the day. I don't know what was happening, but a piece of the unload brake caliper was removed and a maintenance man was attacking something between the rails with an angle grinder.

The freshly-painted Iron Pumpkin...I mean Iron Dragon.

Across from Wildcat is, of course, the Iron Pumpkin. Er, Dragon. Yikes! The station and trains are as usual, but the track is now Magnum Orange...and the structure is ORANGE!. Not "orange," mind you, but "ORANGE!!!" that clashes with Mantis and Dragster and sears your retinas as you look at it. Apart from that, not much to report, except that there is now a virtually inaudible auto-spiel on the platform, and a single Mantis:TCFKAB car was sitting on Iron Dragon Island.

I took the Sky Ride up to the front of the park. The drive-end Sky Ride station is now bright BLUE! with dark blue accents, and a new planter has been built around the back of the building, effectively extending the queue by about 15 feet and moving the entrance to the center of the back of the building. Across from the Sky Ride building is a new YELLOW!! building containing Donut Time. Half of the building is a spacious donut kitchen populated by tray-fed Belshaw donut making machines. The rest of the building is a modern coffee shop. I stopped in and had a $0.85 glazed donut. It's a little heavier and a little larger than a Krispy Kreme, and the glaze is slightly less sweet.It's good, it's distinctive, and I'll bet it would have been better if I had been there early enough to get one hot. In any case, it's better than the selection at Mister Donut at 11:00 in the morning... [Footnote 1].

Raptor's entrance has moved, so I expect people will have difficulty finding it now. The new entrance is about 5' to the left of the original location, and now faces the park's main gate. I guess that's to entice people to ride it first instead of running past on their way to Top Thrill Dragster and Millennium Force. I walked right by, knowing that a 30 minute wait was right behind the fence, and went back to Blue Streak.

Blue Streak

Not so many years ago, Blue Streak was good but not great. Then Cedar Point made a hideous series of modifications, first butchering the station and installing an incompetent control computer, then by doing unspeakable things to the trains that made them almost as bad as the Kings Island Racer. Then, having dramatically increased the train weight and removed the cushioning from the seats, they neglected the track until the ride had become an unrideable mess. Then, a strange thing happened. They fixed it. Well, mostly. The trains are still awful, as there must be some State directive that no adult wood coaster in Ohio is allowed to have a decent train. But the trackwork is amazing, and the ride is smooth and fast. It is refreshing to be able to sit down in a PTC train and pull the lap bar down to its third detent without having to force it. It's even better to return to the station realizing that you've had your best wood coaster ride of the season...and it was really good.

I went back down the midway and down the Frontier Trail. Over in Frontiertown, the Swan Boats are gone. I had heard good things about Mean Streak, so I decided to check it out. No wait was a good start. I sat in the back seat.

Well, the trains are still filled with that hard foam crap. The ride still has those awful brakes on the first drop, but they aren't grabbing nearly as hard as they did last year. The ride is smoother and faster, and it has one moment where it almost has airtime just before the mid-course brake. In terms of ride quality, it's as good as it ever was, which is better than usual. In terms of ride action, it's still dreadfully dull. In short, it runs a lot like The Beast used to, before its trackwork went to heck, only without the tunnels and woods.

Across Frontiertown, I took a ride on the Mine Ride. Absolutely nothing has changed here. The hard seat "cushions" added last year still make for a tight fit and an uncomfortable ride, and the computer still does an utterly incompetent job of parking the train. Now wait a minute...there is one change from last season. The crew member who was checking heights wasn't stationed at the top of the entrance ramp right outside the station. He has been exiled down to the midway to stand at the queue entrance instead. The old turnstile is still in place at the top of the ramp, but there is a new turnstile down at the queue entrance. I wonder why they did that...

Over at Gemini I found out where that new Mine Ride turnstile came from, as Gemini now has only one entrance turnstile. Two of Gemini's trains are sitting in the Mean Streak infield, and rumor has it that Cedar Point isn't planning on getting them out this season. I thought this to be a very short-sighted action, as while the ride doesn't need to run six trains and 3,600 PPH anymore, there have been numerous occasions where one side or the other went down mechanical, and at times like that, a third train for 1,800 PPH 3-train operation would be a lot better than running two trains (1,200 PPH) in those situations. That said, the way the ride was running today, it wouldn't have mattered. The platform got new boarding gates, unfinished welded aluminum single gates just like most of the park's other coasters, and it got some exit gates on the platform, positioned in a terribly inconvenient fashion at the top of the exit stairs. On the loading side, there is a manual access gate between the fourth and fifth cars that looks just like one of the normal boarding gates at first glance; people kept lining up behind it, not realizing that there is no seat at that position.

Realizing my mistake before the train arrived, I moved down to the back row of car #4. Gemini didn't get the expected new computer system this year, so the train blew into the station and parked expertly. The gates opened, and we boarded the train. I don't know what was going on, but it took the crew forever to clear the train for dispatch, so long, in fact, that the other pair of trains had to wait for us. That's right, they were stacking trains with only two pair running.

Our ride was brakeless, as has become almost normal on Gemini over the past couple of years. It was also amazingly rough in the helix, specifically over a spot that looks like it even has a new track-tie. We then ground to a halt outside the station with the standard tooth-chipping Gemini E-stop, and waited. And waited. And waited. And waited. Finally the red train pulled out of the station, and we continued to wait. I don't know what the delay was, but the red train cleared the lift before the blue train was ready to go. At that point, the crew just waited and dispatched it again with the red train that had gone out with my train. Even at that, the red train that had gone out while I was waiting had to stop and wait. This is no way to run a railroad. I guess if the crew can't properly run the ride with four trains, six is automatically out of the question. Ick! If this doesn't improve, the lines for Gemini this season are going to be downright nasty!

I took a turn through Camp Snoopy and failed to notice any major changes, then took another ride on Magnum. I noted that Magnum Man Jerry had apparently been there...the third seat of the blue train was roped off [Footnote 2].

The red train on Millennium Force is not quite ready for service.

I skipped Dragster and Corkscrew, but decided it might be a good time to ride Millennium Force. The line didn't even fill the final block of the queue maze, and under normal circumstances it would have been about a ten or fifteen minute wait. But, as we all know by now, these were not normal circumstances. First of all, the red train was sitting on the storage track with many pieces obviously missing. Second, it was taking an unusually long time to get people loaded in to the train. So it took nearly 40 minutes for me to get to the boarding platform. I took my seat in the back of the train and fastened the seat belt, then pulled the lap bar down as far as it can comfortably go. Then the attendant came along. He tugged on the seat belt, which is fine with me (sitting in the seat it is almost impossible to get enough leverage to pull the belt snug, even with the loop on the end...the buckle is designed to be non-adjustable once fastened, and the webbing has an unusually aggressive surface texture). Then, against my warnings, he gave the lap bar a mighty shove into my lap, literally putting his weight behind it.

OUCH!

I have always disliked the lap bars on Millennium Force, ever since I discovered (the hard way) a little quirk about their construction. Let me put it this way...I don't mind at all having the lap bar down into my lap. It happens all the time over on Magnum. That isn't the problem at all. The problem is that in order for the lap bar to sit in my lap, the 3" diameter steel pipe it is attached to has to be pushed back past the point where it makes contact with something it shouldn't, which then gets wedged in between the pipe and the seat. After ramming the lap bar thusly, when I hollered about it, the operator hollered back, "It's for your safety, Sir."

Ah, this is obviously some strange usage of the word 'safe' that I wasn't previously aware of [Footnote 3]. Since when is it "safe" to have a 3" pipe rammed into one's genitals? How was my ride? My ride absolutely sucked, thank you, as I spent it in significant pain because somebody doesn't understand how a lap bar is supposed to work, and Cedar Point has allowed paranoia to replace experience and logic in the wake of the incident at Six Flags New England. I should have filed a formal complaint. Hell, I should have filed assault charges. There is absolutely no reason for that kind of thing to be going on. Either the ride is perfectly safe the way the park has operated it for the past four seasons, or it isn't. If it is perfectly safe, then there is no need for them to get paranoid just because a park 600 miles away managed to screw up one time too many with a similar-but-not-identical ride and lost a customer. If it isn't perfectly safe, then they need to bring in an engineer to do a proper analysis of the ride and design a mechanical fix. Because what they are doing now is an operational tweak (I wouldn't even call it a fix) that is destroying their operations, aggravating customers, and worst of all, hurting people. I really like Millennium Force, but if this is the way they're going to run things this season, I'd just as soon ride Magnum.

[And this was BEFORE they started the latest nuttiness with the seat belt length...]

The redecorated Dodgem building and its new sign

Wildcat was out of service, with a man in a blue shirt vigorously attacking the final brake run with a grinding tool. I took a right at the redecorated Dodgem building. I really like the new sign. I'm not so sure about the blue and grey chevron design around the building roof, but the sign just screams "amusement park", which is sort of the point. It fits right in with Coasters, Johnny Rockets, and the Games Buildings. I wonder if they will eventually consider removing the ugly backlit awning from the concession building on the main midway.

At this point, Raptor was a "Sandusky Walk-On", so I did. Is it me, or is this thing running FAST? I heard the brake on the mid-course, but I didn't feel anything there. It's neat to see how refined Raptor's operation has become in the past ten years. Now the trains hardly even stop in the station anymore.

A lap around the Amusement Circle took me to Disaster Transport and Space Spiral. Disaster Transport highlights one of the hidden annoyances of Transitions lenses...I got into the queue house and couldn't see a thing. Neither the queue house nor the ride has changed. I still miss "Eddie" or whatever his name was [Footnote 4].

Upon arrival in Alaska [Footnote 5] I noticed how sparsely populated the region was. This was mostly because Wicked Twister was out of service. There was no sign of life anywhere around the ride, no obvious problems, and nobody working on the ride. I heard a rumor later in the day that First Energy was playing games with the voltage or something and was in fact causing problems for Dragster. It's only a rumor, but knowing that Dragster is connected to Wicked Twister's electrical service, it makes sense that if they could only reliably operate one of the two rides, Dragster would be the more likely choice, particularly with its less critical electrical requirements.

It was getting late, and I'd only had a half-dozen rides on Magnum. Since Magnum turned fifteen years old last week, and since the crowd was small enough to make it possible, I wanted to get fifteen rides. Which I did, by getting eight rides in quick succession in the last hour of the day. The park continued to run all three trains right up to the closing bell. The crowd was very light, though, and for most of my later rides there were only six or seven people on the train. On the one hand that meant rides with the trim brakes off, on the other, with that few people on the train, the empty cars tend to bounce around a lot, making for some rough rides.

I never realized that the shipping channel into Sandusky Bay is literally feet off-shore from the tip of the peninsula, and runs right along the shoreline past Lighthouse Point. So it caught me by surprise during one ride when a gigantic ore boat, the Atlantic Erie, cruised by, so close to Magnum's turnaround that I could see into the pilot house. It took about three rides for the boat to get from the end of the breakwater to somewhere past Mean Streak, presumably heading for the coal docks. Seeing the channel position makes me wonder if Cedar Point ever brings in ride parts via lake freighter, unloading them on the lake pier adjacent to Lighthouse Point.

I finished my day at the park not with the last ride of the night on Magnum, but close to it, with my fifteenth circuit of the day. The more I ride it, the more I like it. I've ridden it for the past fourteen years, and there are a lot of rides out there now that are taller, faster, smoother, or whatever-er than Magnum XL-200. But none of those other rides is Magnum. I've been missing it in the off-season, and it felt good to be back.

It's going to be a good 2004 season, I think.

--Victoria M. Althoff's son, Dave Jr.

Footnote 1: Refer to "Breakfast at Gulliver's" when Mister Donut had three donuts on the shelf with three hours to go until closing time... [Return to text]

Footnote 2: Jerry, who is most often noted for strange hair color, is less often noted for somehow managing to "break" Cedar Point's rides when he is present. Okay, so the evidence is mostly circumstantial, but still... [Return to text]

Footnote 3: Anybody recognize that? [Return to text]

Footnote 4: The name I used for the "onboard computer" voice whose most memorable line was, "I'm losing control! I'm losing control!". [Return to text]

Footnote 5: Disaster Transport is themed as a trip to Alaska on Dispatch Master Transport. They get you there in under five minutes or they don't get you there at all. [Return to text]

--DCAjr

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