A roller coaster is a type of amusement ride employing a form of elevated railroad track that carries passengers on a train through tight turns, steep slopes, and other elements usually designed to produce a thrilling experience. Trains consist of open cars connected in a single line, and the rides are often found in theme parks around the world. Roller coasters first appeared in the 17th century, and LaMarcus Adna Thompson obtained one of the first known patents for a roller coaster design in 1885, based on the Switchback Railway which opened a year earlier at Coney Island.
PortAventura World is an entertainment resort in Salou and Vila-seca, Tarragona, on the Costa Daurada in Catalonia, Spain. It was built around the PortAventura Park theme park, which attracts around 3.5 million visitors per year, making it the most visited theme park in Spain and the sixth most visited theme park in Europe.
A wooden roller coaster is a type of roller coaster classified by its wooden track, which consists of running rails made of flat steel strips mounted on laminated wood. The support structure is also typically made of wood, but may also be made of steel lattice or truss, which has no bearing on a wooden coaster's classification. The type of wood often selected in the construction of wooden coasters worldwide is southern yellow pine, which grows abundantly in the southern United States, due to its density and adherence to different forms of pressure treatment.
A roller coaster inversion is a roller coaster element in which the track turns riders upside-down and then returns them to an upright position. Early forms of inversions were circular in nature and date back to 1848 on the Centrifugal railway in Paris. These vertical loops produced massive g-force that was often dangerous to riders. As a result, the element eventually became non-existent with the last rides to feature the looping inversions being dismantled during the Great Depression. In 1975, designers from Arrow Development created the corkscrew, reviving interest in the inversion during the modern age of steel roller coasters. Elements have since evolved from simple corkscrews and vertical loops to more complex inversions such as Immelmann loops and cobra rolls. The Smiler at Alton Towers holds the world record for the number of inversions on a roller coaster with 14.
Custom Coasters International (CCI) was one of the premier wooden roller coaster manufacturers in the world and produced 34 wooden coasters in eleven years — more than any other company in recent times. It was located in West Chester, Ohio.
Bolliger & Mabillard, officially Bolliger & Mabillard Consulting Engineers, Inc. and often abbreviated B&M, is a roller coaster design consultancy based in Monthey, Switzerland. The company was founded in 1988 by engineers Walter Bolliger and Claude Mabillard, both of whom had worked for Giovanola.
A dual-tracked roller coaster is a roller coaster that consists of two tracks. They can be configured as racing, dueling, or Möbius loop roller coasters. Some dual-track coasters operate only one track side at a time, including Rolling Thunder and Colossus. Others may opt to run one side facing frontward and one side facing backward.
Dragon Khan is a steel sit-down roller coaster in the PortAventura Park theme park in Salou and Vilaseca (Tarragona), Catalonia, Spain. It has eight inversions, which was a world record until the opening of the ten-inversion Colossus in Thorpe Park, United Kingdom in 2002.
American Eagle is a wooden racing roller coaster located at Six Flags Great America theme park in Gurnee, Illinois. It was the first wooden roller coaster designed by Intamin of Switzerland and was built in 1981 by the contracting firm Figley-Wright at a cost of $10 million. While most of the records have since been broken, American Eagle had the longest drop and fastest speeds among wooden roller coasters when it debuted and is still recognized as a top racing coaster in the United States.
Le Monstre is a wooden roller coaster at La Ronde amusement park in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Le Monstre is the largest wooden roller coaster in Canada and is also the tallest two-track wooden roller coaster in the world.
In the context of amusement rides, air time, or airtime, refers to the time during which riders of a roller coaster or other ride experience either frictionless or negative G-forces. The negative g-forces that a rider experiences is what creates the sensation the rider feels of floating out of their seat. With roller coasters, air time is usually achieved when the train travels over a hill at speed. There are different sensations a rider will feel depending on the ride being an ejector or floater airtime ride.
Roller coaster amusement rides have origins back to ice slides constructed in 18th-century Russia. Early technology featured sleds or wheeled carts that were sent down hills of snow reinforced by wooden supports. The technology evolved in the 19th century to feature railroad track using wheeled cars that were securely locked to the track. Newer innovations emerged in the early 20th century with side friction and underfriction technologies to allow for greater speeds and sharper turns. By the mid-to-late 20th century, these elements intensified with the introduction of steel roller coaster designs and the ability to invert riders.
Wing Coaster is engineering firm Bolliger & Mabillard’s designation for its winged roller coaster designs. Winged roller coasters are a type of steel roller coaster where pairs of riders sit on either side of a roller coaster track in which nothing is above or below the riders. B&M began development on the first Wing Coaster between 2007 and 2008 leading to the opening of Raptor at Gardaland on 1 April 2011. There were sixteen B&M-designed Wing Coasters either under construction or operating worldwide as of December 2020.
Terrain roller coasters are roller coasters which take advantage of the usually-natural undulations of the land upon which they are built. Such rides may often weave through forests, and some may even dive down cliffs. Because they tend to stay close to the ground, they require fewer supports and thus are usually cheaper than the same coaster on flat ground.
Kumbak is a Dutch amusement ride manufacturing company. In addition to manufacturing its own rides, the company primarily specialises in changing existing rides and attractions, originally made by other manufacturers.
Shambhala: Expedición al Himalaya is a steel hypercoaster roller coaster located at PortAventura Park in Salou and Vilaseca, Spain. Manufactured by Bolliger & Mabillard, it was the tallest and fastest coaster in Europe at the time of its opening. The height and speed records were beaten in April 2017 by Red Force, which was also opened in PortAventura World in its new theme park Ferrari Land. Among coasters with a lift hill, the height and speed records were beaten in July 2018, when Hyperion opened at Energylandia in Poland. Shambhala is named and themed after the inaccessible land in the Himalayas: Shambhala. The coaster was announced on 24 October 2011, and opened to the public on 12 May 2012.
Red Force is a steel launched roller coaster located at Ferrari Land within PortAventura World in Salou, Catalonia, Spain. The ride was manufactured by Liechtenstein based Swiss manufacturer Intamin and opened on 7 April 2017. With a height of 112 metres (367 ft) and a maximum speed of 180 kilometres per hour (112 mph), Red Force is the tallest and fastest roller coaster in Europe as of 2024, beating Shambhala which has a height of 76 metres.
PortAventura Park is a theme park located in the PortAventura World Resort, 85 km southwest of Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain, in the municipalities of Salou and Vila-seca, on the Costa Daurada. The park opened on 1 May 1995 under the management of the Tussauds Group which had a 40.01% share in the park, La Caixa (33.19%), Anheuser-Busch (19.9%) and FECSA (6.7%). It opened to the general public on 2 May 1995.
The Bobsleds is an in-house hybrid roller coaster at Seabreeze Amusement Park in Irondequoit, New York. The coaster opened in its current form in 1962, making it one of the first roller coasters in the world to use steel tubular track, second only to the Matterhorn Bobsleds at Disneyland.
