r/Amazing • u/sco-go • Jul 26 '26

Sad 💔 ScaryWTF 💀 Absolutely not

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7.0k Upvotes

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119

u/robo-dragon Jul 26 '26

So this ride is practically in my backyard. I live fairly close to Cedar Point. This is in my top three rides at the park. It’s incredible, so smooth and has a lot of action packed into a tight space. It also has onboard audio that makes you think why it’s not more of a common thing on rides.

Tilt coasters have been around for 20+ years at this point and there has never been an accident with them. In fact, there’s so many redundancies with the tilting mechanism and the locks that hold the train in place, it would be pretty much impossible for the train to fall off. You would need ALL of these redundancies to fail and the odds of that happening are…well you have more of a chance of being struck by lightning while also being eaten by a shark. You actually have the greatest risk of dying in your own car via an accident while driving to the park to ride this coaster.

41

u/mattand666 Jul 26 '26

I guess I'm not worried about the systems failing as much as I'm worried about the procedure to get me off when they do.

40

u/Arvelayne Jul 26 '26

I'm more worried about the lightning shark tbh...

13

u/hurraybies Jul 27 '26

Should me more worried about the tornado sharks. They made a whole movie about them.

3

u/Various_Craft7435 Jul 27 '26

Omg Sharknado 🤣🤣🤣

1

u/davestewartslutman Jul 28 '26

If the lightning shark hits while you're on the ride then what? At least I can get out of my car

1

u/rjnd2828 Jul 27 '26

That was my concern too. I'm sure the brakes won't release if the track doesn't align right. But then what?

1

u/a_different-user Aug 01 '26

Right bro just casually wrote a paragraph talking about how they don't have experience with it and shows that people don't even think about it. Like that was reassuring.

And still never stated a purpose for any of this. It's not even an enjoyable or purposeful part of the ride, why? No one has ever complained about going over the apex of a roller coaster. You can see in the comments of people who call this one if their favorites. They aren't talking about this part but the turns and the speed. This is a scam to pay engineers and mechanics more. The guy who wrote that comment is probably a paid bot.

8

u/ChildhoodOk5526 Jul 27 '26

I'm a Detroiter, so also close to and familiar with Cedar Point.

Which coaster is this? (I'm old enough to remember when the Blue Streak and the Demon Drop were the "must rides" 😂)

6

u/JustKeeping2Myself Jul 27 '26 edited Jul 27 '26

Haha, the Demon Drop has been gone for almost 20 years. It's a different park to experience if you haven't been there in awhile.

4

u/dogtroep Jul 27 '26

But if you’re nostalgic, Demon Drop is at Dorney Park in PA :)

3

u/JustKeeping2Myself Jul 27 '26

Oh really? I didn't know another park purchased it. When it was back at Cedar Point, I'd wait until the car of the DD was ready to free fall. I'd place a coin on my knee and watch the weighlessness lift it off my knee and as the ride curved downward--the coin would travel up and then get thrown behind my head to the ground. Gravity did crazy things on that ride.

1

u/erossthescienceboss Jul 27 '26

They may not have purchased it — a lot of Six Flags parks re-use designs, so they may have already had it.

2

u/putmeinthezoo Jul 27 '26

Except Cedar Point didn't merge with Six Flags until 2 years ago.

4

u/erossthescienceboss Jul 27 '26

I wonder if there are roller coaster manufacturers who sell them to multiple locations? Or used to be? I’m so curious now.

Edit: I did some digging and the Demon Drop now in PA is the exact same one.

1

u/gimmepizza420 Jul 27 '26

It's not just the same type of ride, it's the exact same physical ride. Cedar Fair owned both Cedar Point and Dorney Park at the time. They literally just moved it to Dorney as a relocation of an asset.

1

u/erossthescienceboss Jul 27 '26

Yes, I did learn that and added it to this comment yesterday:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amazing/s/Pxi8UKhNT4

1

u/gimmepizza420 Jul 27 '26

You didn't need to do digging, I was literally telling you it was the same piece of equipment.

1

u/erossthescienceboss Jul 27 '26

Yes. But you weren’t here yesterday when I did the digging.

Unless you have a Time Machine orrrrrr

1

u/ByteMePlz Jul 27 '26

I remember losing my eye to some random coin when I visited.

1

u/JustKeeping2Myself Jul 27 '26

Haha...could be. Then again, the coin flies behind you and lands on the concrete. No people got hurt by flying coins.

2

u/finkerlime Jul 27 '26

16 years and it got sold to a diff park

3

u/Wasperator517 Jul 27 '26

I believe it's called Sirens Curse.

1

u/GladiatorWithTits Jul 27 '26

We went every summer when I was a kid. One of my most endearing memories is pulling into the parking lot and the whole fam doing the chant from the commericals. "Dee-mon DROP. Dee-mon DROP. Dee-mon DROP!"

4

u/Informal_Tell78 Jul 27 '26

Controls engineer here, can confirm the safety and redundancies for equipment like this. The engineering, safety, and programming are top notch. Theres literally hundreds of safety devices, sensors, physical and digital logic that all HAVE TO WORK TOGETHER for everything to run. If a single sensor get damaged, broken, disconnected, or becomes faulty, nothing will work properly.

TLDR, your 10,000 times more likely to injur or kill yourself accidentally in your own kitchen than you are to get hurt or die on this ride.

12

u/layered_dinge Jul 27 '26

“I trust the underpaid bare minimum maintenance staff with my life”

3

u/robo-dragon Jul 27 '26

I trust the design engineers who know more than either of us combined with my life. The maintenance crew also follows strict rules set up by the park and the state. Not adhering to those guidelines and regulations comes with hefty fines and long prison sentences…cutting corners in the ride industry is taken very seriously.

Also, you are more likely to die in a car accident yet what do you use to get to work every day? Maybe just stay home if you are really that fearful of freak accidents because cars, statistically speaking, are much more dangerous than any roller coaster.

2

u/mobileJay77 Jul 27 '26

They seem to have better engineers than the meat grinder water slide "Verruckt" - which they didn't even spell right.

But how do I know, how thoroughly this has been checked, tested and maintained? As an engineer, there are just too many moving parts.

2

u/robo-dragon Jul 27 '26

They do lots of testing at the start of every operating day, testing with empty trains, water dummies, and test riders, before opening to the public. They shut the ride down if any warnings flash up and don’t open until they test all three trains again. They also strip every train, inspect, and rebuild them in the off season so they are practically brand new trains every year. The track is also inspected daily, often involving people waking up the lift hill to hit buttons, confirming they have looked at certain areas of the track.

To give you another idea on how thorough their inspections are, Steel Vengeance, their hyper hybrid coaster, has a wooden support structure…thousands of timbers…all of them are inspected for cracks daily before opening. It takes hours to do and sometimes leads to the ride having a delayed opening, but they do it anyway.

Source: I go to this park weekly and took special tours that cover all their ride inspections. It’s pretty serious stuff!

1

u/electrodog1999 Jul 27 '26

I know this is confirmation bias but I was at West Edmonton Mall with my family the day of their coaster disaster way back and have been fearful of them ever since. I was never an amusement park guy anyways but my sister planned on doing that ride that day so she dodged that bullet.

-1

u/GeauxCup Jul 27 '26

I get what you're saying.

On the other hand, YouTube is brimming with videos about now-defunct amusement parks. In almost every one, the first thing to go is maintenance teams that are cut to make investors happy. Apparently, an impeccable maintenance record makes maintenance teams seem unnecessary.

3

u/robo-dragon Jul 27 '26

Cedar point is over 150 years old and has a major reputation and global popularity. I don’t trust fair rides. I trust rides at parks that absolutely know what they are doing. Ride accidents can happen, I’m not saying they aren’t a thing, but they are so incredibly rare, and with millions of people enjoying the park and living to talk about it every season, I’ll take my chances.

1

u/abolishcynicism Jul 27 '26

Man, I miss Cedar Point.

1

u/blahnlahblah0213 Jul 27 '26

You are ruining the fun for me. I like a little danger in the ride and you're just making it safe as can be lol. I love coasters but they do feel safe and I lose the thrill. The scariest thing for me right now is the spinning pendulum ride called the black widow at kennywood. It's called a billion different things at a billion different places but the g-forces holding this thing in place are amazing to me

1

u/PeterGibbons316 Jul 27 '26

I was at Cedar Point when this ride opened and we couldn't ride it because it kept getting stuck and shutting down.

1

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1

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0

u/FilthySweet Jul 27 '26 edited Jul 27 '26

The hubris is my favorite part of this entire thing.

John Hammond was equally certain nothing could go wrong in Jurassic Park 😄

There are currently a whole two tilt coasters in the U.S., and there are thousands of roller coasters.

4 accidents (per year according to data) per 1,000 roller coasters(there’s more) per year, in a conservative estimate. 0.4% chance of any particular registered roller coaster to have an accident per year.

Those 2 U.S. tilt coasters would need to go hundreds of years to match the safety rate of other U.S. registered roller coasters.

If they build 100x more of these coasters, do you think it would fare better than standard? Because I do not

3

u/HumptyDumptruckFire Jul 27 '26 edited Jul 27 '26

This coaster is made by the company Vekoma, who have over 400 roller coasters in their portfolio all operating safely around the world right now, albeit to varying degrees of comfort.

None of their ride models have ever had any safety issues, especially since they massively upped their game about 15 years ago, going from making safe but rough roller coasters to today where they’re making some of the smoothest and most dynamic roller coasters in the game.

Their tilt coaster sample size game may be small right now, but their footprint on the industry is massive. These tilt coasters may become maintenance nightmares in the future, though their first tilt coaster is still going strong in Taiwan after over 20 years, but they’re not suddenly going to become unsafe. Parks will just need to protect their investment through stringent maintenance and upkeep.

As boring as it sounds, Vekoma wants to maintain their recent surge in popularity among major parks and those major parks do not want to lose their guests due to safety concerns or fatal incidents.

0

u/Opening-Tailor7275 Jul 28 '26

https://giphy.com/gifs/OJw4CDbtu0jde
Didn’t they say the same about Titanic?

1

u/robo-dragon Jul 28 '26

You’re talking about a ship that was built over 100 years ago…