Casino Pier as seen from the boardwalk
"I didn't know Miler track could do that!"
Friday morning, we got up early, had a quick breakfast at the hotel, and got back on the road. On this particular morning, the road in question happened to be Interstate 80, down to the Pennsylvania Turnpike Northeast Extension and then off at Levittown, PA, at the New Jersey border. We stopped at the hotel where we would spend the night, dropped off the car, and the whole crew of us piled into a van for our trip up the shore. The "whole crew" in this case consisted of myself, April, Pete, Duke, Lisa, and Ron. Between fuel, parking, and tolls...especially tolls...grouping up like this would result in substantial cost savings. At the end of the day we figured the total fixed travel expenses to be about $90. But I am getting ahead of myself.
Casino Pier as seen from the boardwalk
Our first stop was the town of Seaside Heights, New Jersey. We parked next to Jenkinson's Breakwater Beach and stepped into the arcade and carousel building on the street side of Casino Pier. With temperatures in the upper 90's and extreme humidity, even the ocean didn't provide much relief, but lunch in an air-conditioned pizza shop was a good start. Then we were off to the rides. We started by buying a 20-ticket sheet, but that proved to be inadequate for even the limited amount of riding we were planning to do. Tickets are $0.75 each with rides requiring between 3 and 8 tickets.
We worked our way around the pier in a more or less logical fashion, starting with the new Pirate's Hideaway ride. It's a small steel roller coaster built in an open enclosure...a building configuration not entirely unlike a Himalaya. It starts with a spiral lift very similar to the system used on the Zamperla Volare flying coasters, and finishes up with a series of small hills folded over to fit a very small footprint. It's an entertaining ride, anyway, but nothing particularly extreme.
Casino Pier's Star Jet coaster
At the end of the pier is the relatively new Star Jet, presumably a replacement for an old Jet Star or something of that type. Anyway, the ride is from Miler and bears more than a passing resemblance to the Scandia Screamer which I rode back in January. Like that ride, this ride looks at first glance like an overgrown Miler kiddie coaster, complete with the C-channel track and the train with the goofy looking pin-set lap bars. But this ride is different. While the Scandia Screamer has a very classic design, with dips in the middle and high, flat turns on either end, the Star Jet has a whole lot more in common with Herr Schwarzkopf's Jet Star. Miler has managed to somehow solve the problems that Disney couldn't and that Arrow never bothered with, the problems of bending a flat steel track in three dimensions and still keeping the rails oriented correctly. That was the reason that Arrow developed the round-tube coaster track: because with a circular cross section, it doesn't matter which face is 'up', the wheel will roll on it the same way. Miler apparently decided that doing things the easy way is for all the other manufacturers, and with the Star Jet demonstrates that even complicated track bends can be done with square rails. The ride runs like an overgrown Jet Star and I actually liked it quite a lot. The only real problem with the ride is that there is no roof or sunshade over the loading area and as the train sat waiting for riders, the seats got really really HOT!
Pete claimed that the dark ride was one of his favorites, and with a ride on Stillwalk Manor we found out why. It's a two-story ride-through, filled with a whole variety of stunts. It also contains an elaborate surveillance system, including not only the usual collection of infra-red cameras, but also an attendant stationed inside. Just inside the door, there is a quick snap from a blast of compressed air right under the car, and this caused a sudden reaction in April. The attendant clearly witnessed this and proceeded to *ahem* make his presence known in at least four locations within the ride, which more or less completely freaked April out. To add to the effect, I didn't even see the guy the first two times, so when she asked me if I had seen him, I truthfully answered, "See what? No." Obviously he had targeted our car; none of the other people in our party had seen him. Anyway, as Pete had promised, it was a good dark ride.
April inquired about the Centrifuge ride and learned that it was an indoor Scrambler. We entered the building and inside we found not a Scrambler but rather a fun-house, featuring a short dark maze, and a revolving barrel trick. This all led to a dark room with a door with a sign that read, "Door opens only after the last ride has finished." We waited a few minutes, and the door opened. Inside a dark, air-conditioned room we found an Eli Bridge Scrambler. We were the only riders on this cycle, which featured a dark room with a light show and music that was just a little bit too loud. Let me clarify that, just so you don't think I'm "just too old--" the music was a little bit too loud because it was just loud enough to produce distortion. Yes, it was uncomfortably loud, but I can forgive that if it isn't distorting. The other thing I noticed was that there were at least six park employees in the building to operate this ride. I don't know if they were taking air-conditioned breaks from other parts of the pier, or if it really takes this many people to operate a Scrambler. If that's the way staffing is in New Jersey, perhaps that's why they are charging $6.00 for a ride on a Scrambler!
A 'new Miler' mouse.
There were two more coasters on the pier for me to ride, and since most of the others in the group had been here before, it was just me and Ron riding them. The first was a Miler Wild Mouse called the Wild Mouse. It's a traditional Wild Mouse layout with some extra curving and twisting treats thrown in. It uses the long nosed cars as on the Star Jet and again it does things that I didn't think Miler's trackwork was supposed to be able to do. The more I see of these Miler coasters the more I wonder why we don't see more of them.
The last ride of the pier for me was the 6-ticket Hot Tamales, an L&T steel kiddie coaster. Not much to write home about; the operators gave me 6 circuits on the ride. I wondered if they could have just given me one circuit for one ticket instead.
We finished up at Casino Pier and walked on down the boardwalk. There is a fee for beach access in Seaside Heights, so we stayed on the boardwalk. Past a large collection of shops, storefronts, storefront games, and small restaurants is another amusement pier, Funtown Pier.
After running out of tickets twice at Casino Pier, I started by walking through the whole ride collection at Funtown Pier. I figured out what I wanted to ride, counted the tickets, and made my purchase accordingly. The pier has a large collection of rides, but most are fairly standard carnival fare or kiddie rides. I decided to limit myself to the three major coasters.
An 'old Miler' mouse coaster
The centerpiece of the park's looping coaster
A 'new Miler' family coaster
Like Casino Pier, Funtown Pier has a Miler Wild Mouse coaster called Mighty Mouse. Unlike the mouse at Casino Pier, this Mouse is a very early Carl Miler model which was retired from carnival service in 1959, returned to service at another park in 1995, then installed at Funtown Pier in 2005. The ride is very similar to both the Wild Chipmunk at Lakeside and the Tree Top Racers at Adventure City. It's a cool little ride and while it wasn't as surprising as the Star Jet down the coast, it was a neat little ride.
But Funtown's surprises don't end there. On the edge of the ocean is a looping coaster that at first glance looks like a Pinfari ZL-42 Looping Star. But the ride is much larger than a ZL-42 (58 meters instead of 42), seems to be a bit taller, and has no ballast tanks under it. It turns out that this is an Interpark Loop Coaster. It's still Italian, but it turns out that this is a much better running ride than the Looping Star. It's simple, it's noisy, it is a little bit rough, but ultimately it's quite a decent ride. Don't be put off by the rust, they did a nice job with this one.
The third coaster at Funtown Pier is the simple Family Coaster, and like most of the coasters in Seaside Heights, it comes from Miler. It's an oval with a small helix that is just tall enough to get over the rooftop of the adjacent building. Each ride is multiple circuits, and the ride is a lot like the Ravine Flyer 3 at Waldameer or Bear Trax at Seabreeze.
Having knocked out our coaster credits, we finished up our afternoon in Seaside Heights with a scenic ride on the boardwalk-side Sky Ride. Then we piled back into the van for a ride up into New York City.
Inbound traffic was not as bad as it could have been during the outbound rush hour. We made our way into Brooklyn and found a parking space on Surf Ave., literally across 10th St. from the world-famous Cyclone. We piled out, paid our $8 per person, and filed through the chain-link fence. I had noticed rampant overstaffing at Casino Pier, but that was nothing to what I saw at the Cyclone...the ride was being operated by no less than nine people, with only one train operating. We arrived on the platform just as the train was leaving, and stood by waiting for it to return. When the train returned, Pete climbed into the second seat, April climbed into the third seat, and I went to join April, but the operator indicated that we were too big to ride together. So I moved back to the fourth row, which is the rear axle seat of the lead car. The operator pulled the lap bar back and it locked at both ends into the front edge of the undivided seat. This is where the problems started.
The lap bar on the Cyclone was originally a simple metal bar, meaning the seat was similar to that on the Coaster out in Vancouver. Astroland, or someone, has seen fit to not only add a thick foam pad to the bar, but to add another huge foam pad under the lap bar, then wrap the whole thing in a sleeve similar to the way the lap bar is constructed on a Larson Ring of Fire. Unlike the lap bar on a Ring of Fire, this bar is a lot stiffer. The pad on the bottom of the lap bar is so stiff and comes down so low that in order for the lap bar to close, my legs were pinned very tightly to the seat, so tightly, in fact, that the generous seat cushion had to compress completely under my legs. You see what this means: it means that any reactive motion is basically impossible, and with the seat cushion and lap bar padding fully compressed, there might as well be no padding at all on either the lap bar or the seat bench. And there I am, sitting in the fourth seat of a 4-bench car.
The Cyclone plows through one of the less violent dips (slow motion)
The train rolled out of the station and up the lift. To the right is Astroland Park; ahead is Raritan Bay and a view of the second hill. The first drop is steep, and might have a little airtime, and it is followed by a rise into a cool fan-turn. The problem is that at the bottom of that first drop, the train starts hammering away with more violence than Son of Beast was ever able to muster. Combine that with the way-too-tight lap bar, and the effect is worse than riding Son of Beast in its original Premier train. This isn't good old fashioned wood coaster violence, this is the brutality of a ride that is simply in poor condition. Unfortunately for me, this continued for each subsequent drop, with the train hammering through the drops with such force that it felt like it was trying to smash my lower GI tract out by sheer physical force. Because my upper body was unsecured, my back, neck and head were able to react to the ride, but my lower body could not, and by the time it was over, everything from my waist to my knees, inside and out, was sore. We pulled into the station. Pete pulled out a double and handed it to the attendants and told me and April to get in the front seat. Well, April went to the front seat, but I could only move up to Seat #3. The ride there was a little better by virtue of not being right on the axle, but it was still a brutally rough ride. April and I agreed that the ride was virtually unrideable. April declared that she was done with it; I noted that the ride is a good one and is almost certainly very fixable, the profile is good, but the condition is poor. Pete, meanwhile, who normally has a very low tolerance for a ride in bad condition, proclaimed his love for the ride. I don't get it.
When the ride was over, we headed over to Astroland proper. Considering how long the park has been there, it seems kind of shocking that the park's rest rooms consist of a filthy outhouse trailer. Fortunately, the rest of the park is in a little bit better shape. From Surf Ave. back to about the halfway point in the block, at the gap in the fence across from the Cyclone, is a collection of adult rides including a very nice looking Break Dance, a Top Spin, and a flume that looks to be something like a Reverchon White Water. On the beach side of the park is an extensive kiddieland, which includes the Big Apple kiddie coaster. That coaster is basically a Fajume (although RCDB.com credits this particular installation to Pinfari) Wacky Worm coaster, but the large apple is located over the back corner of the ride instead of over the crossover as on some other models, and I think the apple is larger than on some of the other Wacky Worm rides. What's really cool about this one, though, is the turntable. At the front of the ride, in the loading area, there is a large turntable, with a second track section on it. The ride has two trains, and one train sits facing backward on the front edge of the turntable. Passengers are loaded onto that train, presumably while the other train is running the circuit (it was a slow afternoon, so everything was stopped). Once the train is loaded, the turntable is rotated to put the track section in position to match the rest of the ride, and the ride is started up. That then leaves the second train in position to be unloaded and reloaded. It's really quite clever, and I am actually surprised that I have never seen a system quite like this on any other ride. Well, that's not entirely true; conceptually I guess it's the same as the Giant Wheel that Hersheypark used to have, with the two Ferris wheels mounted on opposite ends of a large boom; or the sliding loading tracks used on Mr. Freeze at SixFlags St. Louis.
All the rides at Deno's Wonder Wheel Park are in excellent condition
Especially the Wonder Wheel
Astroland is built on a level lot, but that isn't really the case for that chunk of Coney Island. At the back of Astroland's lot, a staircase leads up about 10-15 feet up to the boardwalk and beach. We climbed the stairs and noticed that the NYPD had a section of the beach roped off with yellow tape, and was doing something down near the water. Rather than investigate ourselves, we walked next door to Deno's Wonder Wheel Park. Located right next to AstroLand, the beach side of Deno's is level with the boardwalk. Like Astroland, the back half of the park is dominated by an extensive kiddieland, featuring some old rides that look to be in excellent condition. The Mangels fire truck ride is a particularly nice piece, and its condition reminds me of the mint-condition Roto-Whip at Kiddieland in Chicago.
I failed to ride the Sea Serpent, which is yet another Miler family coaster. So I passed up the chance to ride five different Miler coasters in a single day. Instead, I walked down the ramp at the center of the park and immediately approached the Wonder Wheel ticket booth.
Now, I have seen photos and video of the Wonder Wheel. I have even seen Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins in which the title character hangs on the outside of a Wonder Wheel car. I have even ridden the Waagner-Biro copy that runs at Disney's California Adventure. And I am well aware that the Wonder Wheel has been around since 1920, making it older than the venerable Cyclone. Virtually every description I have ever read or heard of the Wonder Wheel describes an ancient, noisy, dilapidated ride that scares most of the people who see it (let alone ride it), usually for all the wrong reasons. And after seeing the condition of the Cyclone and the general conditions at Astroland, I thought I had a pretty good idea of what to expect. I bought my tickets from the ancient ticket kiosk and proceeded to the line for the "swinging" cars.
My first surprise came when the car stopped in front of me and the door slid open. As is usually the case with a gondola Ferris wheel, there are two seats in each of the gondolas. What is unusual about this Wheel is that instead of being perched on the leading and trailing walls of the gondola, facing each other, the seats all face in the same direction, with a partition down the center of the gondola formed by the back of the 'front' seat. My second surprise came after the door slid shut and the wheel started to move. It turns out that just about everything I had ever been told about the condition of the Wonder Wheel seems to be completely false. The wheel has a set of teeth around its outer rim, which engage with the drive sprockets near the base of the wheel. In other words, it's a big gear drive system along the same lines as on Ferris' original Wheel. This is not common today, as friction drives are much more common, using pneumatic tires against a friction strip. This is because gear drives require a certain amount of precision all the way around the wheel, a distance in excess of 470 feet. This is also because gear drives tend to be noisy and to cause harsh vibrations. Well, whoever came up with those limitations forgot to tell the Wonder Wheel. The ride is virtually silent, quieter even than Cedar Point's comparably sized wheel. The gondolas are rock-steady even though they are sitting on flanged steel wheels on lubricated steel tracks. Oh, and about those tracks...when the wheel goes around and hits the tipping point where the cars start to roll, the cars roll quietly, smoothly, without any kind of rumble, bounce, or jolt. I dare say the rolling action of the flanged steel wheels on the L-channel steel tracks on the Wonder Wheel is actually smoother than the rolling action of the plastic wheels on the tubular steel tracks on the Sun Wheel at California Adventure. I can't imagine that the Wonder Wheel ran any better on the day it opened back in 1920 than it runs today. It makes me wonder how much better the Cyclone might be if Deno's were in charge of it as well.
After riding the Wonder Wheel I broke away from the group for a few minutes, long enough to get some photos of the rides at Deno's, at Astroland, and at some of the independent amusement installations nearby, including the Saturn VI I saw the Parachute Tower from a distance, and I got some nice pictures of the Cyclone. I was able to see some of the tracking problems on the ride, such as the dip where the track stack actually leans outward significantly as the train goes through because it is inadequately braced. I wasn't able to get the camcorder into a good position to get that on tape, but I did get a shot showing the rail-bounce in one of the less-brutal dips near the end of the ride (see the movie higher on the page). My phone rang as the rest of the group was ready to go. Conveniently, the van was right across the street.
Before too terribly long, and just after night fall, we parked in the parking lot at Playland Park in Rye, NY. The park is owned by Westchester County, and like Kennywood, the entire park is a National Historic Landmark. Apart from that, the only things I really knew about the park were that they've had incredibly poor luck with their Scrambler and that the park is the home of the only other Prior & Church Racing Derby in the United States.
I entered the park to find a set of concrete buildings that serve as ticketing, and a skating rink. A quick turn to the left and through a large gate leads to a long midway built as a formal garden. I took a quick wander through the extensive Kiddieland to my left, and noted that the NAD kiddie coaster (which I would not be permitted to ride) is significantly larger than the one at Camden Park, and comes into the station a lot faster. It also has a wooden structure, so the only thing it really has in common with the Camden Park ride is the art deco train, which fits in very nicely with the architecture of Playland Park.
I proceeded down the midway and past the Racing Derby and a midway extension off to the left that houses most of the food and game joints. I stopped at the ticket booth and bought a $20 ride pass. Playland Park uses reloadable bar-code cards and a point system instead of ride tickets. Luckily for everyone, it is a bar code system and it works a whole lot better than the magnetic stripe cards at Castles and Coasters. Our group reassembled, and gathered on the entrance ramp to the Dragon Coaster.
The Dragon Coaster is credited to Prior & Church, and it is a gorgeous looking ride. I am generally not a big fan of compact flourescent lights, but Westchester County has installed the miserable things on the coaster along the lift hill and upper curves. They produce a brilliant white light that really makes the ride stand out at night. The ride has an old Morgan train that doesn't do the ride any favors. It has a single-position lap bar that locks in a little lower than it really needs to, and Fiberglas car bodies that don't even sound right on a ride like this. The one good thing about the train is that it is properly trailered, so it rides beautifully on the ride's dips and curves. The Dragon is a Prior & Church ride, but it's no Bobs by any stretch of the imagination. It is a fairly simple arrangement, made a little more exciting when the train gets "eaten" by a glowing-eyed fire-breathing dragon on the back-end turnaround. It's a fun ride, but Playland has a lot more to offer in a relatively short time before closing.
Tucked in behind the Dragon is the Crazy Mouse. In spite of the name, it is NOT a Reverchon spinning mouse; on the contrary, it is a neo-classic Wild Mouse coaster. According to RCDB it is a Zamperla ride. Based on the track style and the ride, I had incorrectly thought it might be a rare Arrow mouse, but it does not have the 'tree' style of construction used on the Arrow rides. It IS a fun ride, though.
Playland has two dark rides (three if you count the Old Mill ride, which was not operating when we visited). Both were slated for demolition before this season, but both were spared. The rides have some unusual seating requirements in that they try to put most of the weight in the back of the car. The rides are entertaining enough, with some rather twisted scenes inside. I think I recognized a lot of stunts from the props displays at IAAPA (I forget the company, but they have the particularly violent electric chair dude and the especially revolting puking dude, who managed to get into both of Playland's dark rides). It's nice to see these rides operating with all of the stunts apparently in top-notch shape.
Playland's newest coaster is a Zamperla Volare 'flying coaster' called Superflight. I've ridden these things at Canada's Wonderland and at Elitch Gardens, so there really is no reason that I have to ride this one. But April hasn't ridden one yet, and Zamperla really does have the whole idea of a 'flying coaster' worked out better than anybody else from a conceptual standpoint, although I'm no real fan of the Volare layout. Unfortunately, when I reached the platform, there was a bit of an altercation. It seems that Playland has an inflexible rule that riders on Superflight are not permitted to wear glasses. Worse, they were actually suggesting that riders put them in a back pants pocket for the ride, which is a great way to get expensive eyewear damaged or lost. With a cord on my glasses, I thought I had something worked out with the attendants, but apparently that wasn't going to fly. And neither would I. This isn't just a matter of not being able to see during the ride; the Volare ride system is designed in such a way that there is no way for me to safely enter or exit the ride without my glasses. Unfortunately, I'd already scanned four points off of my card, and it was obvious that I wasn't going to get a ride. What's particularly annoying is knowning that I've ridden two other, virtually identical rides without any trouble. Well, it was obvious that this stand-off wasn't going anywhere, so I proceeded directly to the Customer Service window and indeed was able to get my points refunded. I noticed that they verified that I had spent four points on Superflight before they added the points back on, but at least they didn't give me any hassle about it. What I REALLY wanted was a ride on the coaster, but apparently there was no way to arrange that.
Playland's Racing Derby (actual speed)
I grabbed a bite to eat at a burrito stand on the midway, but then got hit with a terrible bout of bad timing. I arrived at the Racing Derby, red Icee™ in hand, just as the ride was starting up, with April on board. I had hoped she would wait a minute for me. So I boarded just as she was getting off, and so I didn't understand just what it was she was gesticulating about. I sat on a horse, put my left foot on the lowest peg, put my right foot in the highest peg, and held on. As the ride started, I realized I was the only rider on board. Playland's Racing Derby runs quite fast; faster certainly than the one at Cedar Point. But that is a little bit misleading. Playland's ride has only 14 sweeps, meaning it has only 56 horses. By comparison, Cedar Point's ride has 16 sweeps holding 64 horses. This means that the Cedar Point ride has a larger diameter, and so goes faster at a lower rotational speed. I'll have to do some checking to see for sure how much faster the Playland ride really goes....I know that Cedar Point's ride runs at 4.25 RPM; one rotation of Playland's ride seems to be about 00;00;10;15 (hh;mm;ss;ff at 29.97 FPS) on my camera, which is 10.5 seconds; that's 5.71 RPM. I wonder what the difference in radius is between the two rides... Another major difference is that while all of the horses race on the Cedar Point ride, only two horses on each sweep race at Playland. Anyway, it is a very aggressive ride, and I noticed a nasty 'bump' as my horse ran over the track near the operator's station. But I didn't have any trouble with it. Is it partially because Cedar Point's Cedar Downs Racing Derby was the first major adult amusement ride I ever rode? Anyway, I liked this one, and when I got off I found out what April was gesturing about: she had NOT enjoyed her ride, felt like she was going to be tossed off her horse, and had no intention of ever riding again. Such a shame; I thought it was a good ride.
Across the midway is the Family Flyer which is a small coaster similar to the Howler at Holiday World, but without the head, tail and feet. Getting into the train was a challenge, but it was another coaster credit, and it almost made up for not getting to ride Superflight. With one ride ticket point left, and only a few minutes left before closing, we raced to the ticket booth to get three more points, then raced over to the Dragon to find...that the line had already been closed for the night. Well, the good thing is that at Playland, ride points can not be refunded, but they can be used to pay for concessions (1 point = $1). So at least I didn't waste my ticket money. But I would have liked to get another ride on the Dragon.
Playland is a nice park, certainly the nicest of the parks we visited on this long day, and the lighting is truly magical at night. It kind of reminds me of Lakeside Park in Denver, but without the overgrown wild look to the trees. It ranks with Lakeside and Seabreeze as parks that I truly enjoyed and would love to have in my backyard, and I certainly hope to return. It would be even nicer if I could get a ride on their other coaster when I do.
--Dave Althoff, Jr.
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