The smell of wood – decades-old, cut, stacked, and bolted, bathed in and baked by summer sun; the aroma of grease, clinging to the lift chain as humming motors drag bug-splattered wooden trains upward, anti-rollback wedges clacking into place in their wake; the roaring, rumbling wave of sound as riders snake along a superstructure of swaying wood beams, shuddering and shaking as up-stop wheels ricochet…
For more than a century, the wooden roller coaster has been a staple of amusement parks the world over. And even once it wooden roller coasters were joined by altogether sleeker, smoother steel sisters throughout the 1960s and ’70s, the wooden roller coasters remained landmarks; classics; essentials.
But in the early 2000s, roller coaster enthusiasts encountered a question they’d never had to ask before: what makes a wooden roller coaster a wooden roller coaster? What if the wood wasn’t aged and hand-sawed, but brand new and laser-cut? What if there were no clack-clack-clack of a classic chain lift? And what if the ride itself were smooth as glass, arcing and slaloming and diving as effortlessly as only a steel coaster once could?
Those were the questions begged by EL TORO at Six Flags Great Adventure. A cutting edge, renegade ride born of the Coaster Wars, this one-of-a-kind-in-the-nation prototype by a bold and brash roller coaster manufacturer set out to rewrite the rules of the wooden roller coaster. Did it succeed? Well… Together, let’s tackle the ups and downs of this fierce and furious thrill ride landmark…
History in wood
The story of El Toro really begins with understanding wooden roller coasters – or, as they were known for most of their life, just… roller coasters. Nearly 150 years before the first roller coaster with tubular steel tracks, a first gravity-powered, wood-track-guided amusement ride was thrilling the crème de la crème of French high society.
Allegedly devised when – after Napoleon’s defeat – Russian soldiers stationed in France told stories of the carved ice slides back home, the Promenades Aériennes debuted in Paris in 1817 (above). Rather than the Russian’s sled-based winter “mountains” or wheeled summer chutes, the French version used a rope system to tow three-wheeled carts to the top of ornately decorated wooden structures, where aristocrats could strap into carts affixed to the track and coast (relatively) safely down the winding descent.
It was in 1845 that Denmark’s Tivoli Gardens – by most accounts, the first true amusement park and “pleasure garden” – opened, finally allowing everyday people to experience the thrills of a primitive “Russian mountain.” And with the “middle class’s” first taste of gravity-driven thrills, the race was on.
The second half of the 1800s saw “scenic railways” and their successor, “switchback railways” pop up across the globe, becoming mainstays of the era’s coastal boardwalks, picnic parks, and trolley parks. In the so called “Gilded Age” of new earthly delights and amusements, roller coasters became ever more elaborate installations in “pleasure piers” where visitors gathered in awe of funhouses, tunnels of love, and some of the first public displays of the brand new incandescent lightbulb.
Speaking of which, before the first homes in America were even wired for electricity, carnies were already sending riders “looping-the-loops” on crude, early, inverting roller coasters – made, of course, of wood.
In 1920 – the very same year that the three-lens traffic light was invented – the roller coaster got its real boost and took definitive form. That was thanks to the work of renowned inventor, designer, and builder John Miller. Though Miller already had dozens of coasters to his name, it was reportedly a pair of Jack Rabbits (one at New York’s Seabreeze and another at Pennsylvania’s Kennywood) that Miller debuted a groundbreaking new concept – the “underfriction” or “up-stop” wheel.
As its name implies, the underfriction wheel joined the “road wheels” (riding on a metal strip atop the wooden track) and the “sidefriction wheel” (running along the inside of the rail) to prevent the train from lifting off the track. The underfriction wheel gave the roller coaster incredible new possibilities, allowing it to travel over hills faster than ever with wheels securely fit to the track. Miller was ultimately named on over 100 patents related to the roller coaster, and personally contributed to the design of over 150 rides (with the surviving eight being among the most treasured classics in the industry).
Granted the new, anchoring stability of the up-stop wheel, the Golden Age of the Roller Coaster began in earnest, with increasingly-elaborate “woodies” appearing at picnic parks across the country. Even if the downturn of the Great Depression and World War II in the 1930s and ’40s brought interest in amusements to a sputtering halt, the drought of roller coasters didn’t last forever.
In 1959, the qualifier “wooden” was added to “roller coaster” thanks to the debut of something new: Disneyland’s Matterhorn Bobsleds. Designed by now-legendary coaster manufacturer Arrow Dynamics, the ride was the first to use tubular steel tracks and a computer-controlled system of block brakes, allowing more than one train at a time to safely take to the “slopes.” The Matterhorn might’ve served as a brief reintroduction of the roller coaster after a multi-decade drought… but the true return of the medium wouldn’t happen for another decade…
Resurgence in wood
Especially in the wake of 1971’s Walt Disney World, a whole new generation of “A.D.” (that is, “After Disney”) parks sprung up across the country. This new crop of parks looked a whole lot less like the century-old, slow-growing, organic boardwalks and picnic parks of yesteryear and a whole lot more like the master-planned Magic Kingdom: “Main Streets,” central icons, themed “lands…” and in most cases, roller coasters.
In 1972, Kings Island in Ohio opened with one particularly undisputed highlight: The Racer, designed by John Miller’s protege, John Allen. Though it shared a name with half-century-old classic wooden coasters from the last Golden Age in the 1920s, this modern reimagining was something far greater – the tallest and fastest roller coaster in the world, sure, but more importantly, Kings Island’s Racer was a pivot point. Declared a Roller Coaster Landmark by the American Coasters Enthusiasts, Allen’s Racer is remembered as the spark that lit the “Second Golden Age of the Roller Coaster.”
Now, as a generation of “A.D.” parks sprung to life, wooden coasters found themselves in the midst of a resurgence of their own… alongside their increasingly-competitive steel siblings.
To that end, we can at last shift our focus to the park of interest today: Great Adventure. The brainchild of New York businessman and entrepreneur Warner LeRoy (grandson of Harry Warner – one of the “Warner Bros.”), Great Adventure joined the movement of “A.D.” parks with its opening in 1974.
Imagined by LeRoy as the first phase of a multi-park entertainment destination, the park – strategically located right between the New York and Philadelphia metropolitan areas – was well positioned to serve as a flagship project from the start.
That included its opening lineup. Like any self-respecting park of the era, Great Adventure opened with a ’70s prerequisite – the Arrow-made Runaway Mine Train – as its only opening day coaster. That makes sense. No coaster better exemplifies the rise of steel in the ’70s than Arrow’s ubiquitous, winding family mine trains…
…Except maybe Arrow’s own move into modern inversions beginning with Knott’s Berry Farm’s revolutionary Corkscrew in 1975, launching a line of “Double Loops” and “Corkscrews” that took the country by storm. In 1977, Great Adventure announced that their new ride for ’78 would be the Lightnin’ Loops – a pair of separate, but intertwined winch-launched Arrow coasters that catapulted riders into a single vertical loop.
(By the way, it was just before the debut of Lightnin’ Loops in late 1977 that Great Adventure was purchased by the then-Philadelphia-based Six Flags, making the retitled Six Flags Great Adventure the second acquired park to gain the Six Flags name, and the fifth Six Flags park overall.)
Lightnin’ Loops gave Great America guests their first glimpse into the ongoing innovations made real and rideable by the still-young steel coaster – launching, inverting, and reversing, all in one pair of nimble, dynamic thrill rides.
Certainly, the wooden roller coaster couldn’t keep up with that. But there was still much that the medium could offer for a new generation of parks. Like in a real storm, in 1979, Great Adventure followed up Lightnin’ Loops with Rolling Thunder – a gleaming white, racing wooden coaster. Like the Racer before it, Rolling Thunder was a high-capacity, attention-grabbing, marketable, and thrilling experience… that also read as classic; old-fashioned; historic. That’s something that no steel coaster of the era could be. Whether racing or solo, similar entries popped up alongside new parks across the country: Kings Dominion’s Racer 75 in 1975; Carowinds’ Thunder Road, Six Flags Over Mid-America’s Screamin’ Eagle, Valleyfair’s High Roller, and AstroWorld’s Texas Cyclone in 1976; Magic Mountain’s Colossus in 1979; and American Eagle at Chicago’s Great America in 1981.
And indeed, it’s really no wonder that such daintily-painted wooden coasters became de facto ingredients of emerging amusement parks in the ’70s. Equal parts modern and historic, this rumbling, wild, wooden coaster still recalled the heyday of Americana while offering ever-increasing heights, speeds, and drops, keeping pace with evolving steel models.
But in the world of roller coasters, things change quickly… and as the ’70s gave way to the ’80s, audience’s appetites for wooden roller coasters saw the medium evolve in wild ways…
Wild wood
Across the country, the 1970s had been an era marked by wooden coasters doing their best impression of an earlier time. Though they grew taller and faster, rides from Kings Island’s Racer to Great America’s American Eagle altogether represented an era of out-and-back coaster delights. Often painted gleaming white, these installations were pure Americana; as essential to parks as the Arrow mine trains and Double Loops they served as classic counterparts to.
In 1979, Kings Island returned to the wooden coaster genre, eager to recapture the national profile that the Racer had awarded the park just seven years earlier. The result was a ride that could only be called The Beast – a totally custom, terrain-following wooden coaster that roared across 35 acres of hilly, wooded terrain outside of the park, nearly completely concealed beneath the treeline and hidden from queuing guests. With 7,361 feet of track and over four minutes of ride-time, The Beast was (and remains) the longest wooden roller coaster on Earth.
Though surely not the first custom, terrain following woodie, The Beast no doubt sparked a new era of wooden coasters, abandoning dainty white paint and chaser lights in favor of something very different. It makes sense! Surely by the ’80s, the distinction had been set that steel coasters were smooth and wooden coasters were not. So why not embrace it? Forget graceful, galloping “Racers” or patriotic, soaring “American Eagles”…
It’s no accident that wooden roller coasters of the ’80s had names like Grizzly (Kings Dominion and the Great Americas), Timber Wolf (World of Fun), Wild Beast (Canada’s Wonderland), Wolverine Wildcat (Michigan’s Adventure), Gwazi (Busch Gardens Tampa), Wildcat (Hersheypark), and Raging Wolf Bobs (Geauga Lake). As Arrow’s extreme multi-loopers became the new steel standard, wood coasters had found their equivalent niche: vicious and snarling creatures, embracing their more rough, rudimentary make-ups, departing from midways and heading toward the woods.
It’s important to contextualize the increasingly “wild” story of wooden coasters with the evolution of their counterpart. To jump from the ’70s to the ’90s is to see the steel coaster reinvented entirely. By the mid-’90s, Arrow’s loopers and mine trains looked (and felt) like relics of another time. Instead, new industry players like Intamin, B&M, and Premier had transformed the steel coaster into something much closer to its current form: an ever-evolving genre of taller, fastest, sleeker, smoother rides. Stand-up coasters, inverted coasters, LIM launches, cable lifts, inversions… anything was possible in steel.
So it’s no surprise that wood coasters raced to grow in tandem. And in some cases, they probably grew too much. In an effort to keep wooden coasters as viable headliners, the ’90s introduced a generation of wooden giants notorious for aging poorly. Cedar Point’s Mean Streak. Darien Lake’s Predator. Magic Mountain’s Psyclone. Fiesta Texas’ Rattler. Kings Dominion’s Hurler. Discovery Kingdom’s Roar. Great America’s Viper. Knott’s GhostRider. Geauga Lake’s Villain. Michigan’s Adventure’s Shivering Timbers…
Given that so many of these ’90s-born wooden giants have either been demolished, converted to steel, or written off as unpopular liabilities “jackhammering” guests into oblivion, it seems that more wooden coasters of the ’70s still survive than of the ’90s. Without a doubt, that era of over-growth ended with a bang…
The very same summer that the steel coaster topped 300 feet with Intamin’s Modern Marvel: Millennium Force, Kings Island became home to a third landmark wooden ride – Son of Beast. Don’t let the name fool you. Son of Beast bested its parent in nearly all statistics as the tallest, fastest, steepest wooden roller coaster on Earth. (It was also the second-longest wooden roller coaster on Earth, purposefully leaving the top spot for its revered father.) Most notably, Son of Beast was also the only looping wooden roller coaster on the planet.
As we explored in our in-depth Lost Legends: Son of Beast entry, the ride really served to establish the practical limits of the “classic” wooden roller coaster… Notorious for being one of the most extraordinarily intense rides on the planet, Son of Beast was an incredibly aggressive, violent, and extreme coaster; a ride whose very name equates a case study in why no other wooden coaster before or since dared cross the 200 foot threshold. A logical, doomed conclusion of the “over-growth” of the wild wooden roller coaster through the ’80s and ’90s, Son of Beast proved that the wooden roller coaster simply had different limits than its steel sisters…
At least, until new 21st century innovations offered to change game…
Intamin’s answer
Son of Beast served as case study on the upper limits of the century-old standards of the wooden roller coaster… and on the power of deferred gratification. After all, just a year after the doomed ride’s debut, a whole new tool for wooden coasters entered the scene.
As with so many of the more progressive, experimental prototypes of the “Coaster Wars,” it came from Intamin. Already renowned for major advances in ride technology via Superman: The Escape (the first 100mph caster, powered by a cutting edge linear induction motor launch) and Millennium Force (the first gigacoaster, employing a prototype new cable-based lift mechanism versus the lift chains of old), Intamin seemed an unlikely contender to move “backwards” into the business of wood.
Still, the first of Intamin’s wooden roller coasters – Colossos – opened in Germany’s Heide Park in 2001. And with it, a ride experience no one who’d ridden a wooden roller coaster before would’ve recognized…
The reason was simple. Though Colossos may have looked like any other wooden roller coaster, Intamin had used the same, century-old ingredients to create something fundamentally new.
Though they’d spent decades getting bigger, stronger, and more intense, there’s no question that at their core, wooden roller coasters hadn’t really diverged far from the standards set by John Miller way back in 1919.
Whether in 1920 or in 2000, wooden roller coasters all started as piles of treated lumber, trucked to a cleared site. There, wood would be sawed on-site; hammered and bolted and built from the ground up. Atop these accumulated structures, wooden coaster track comes to life – made of tens of thousands of crossbars, and rails made of stacked lumber and thin strips of metal for wheels to run along…
These great structures are modern marvels; many delicate parts summing up to an unthinkably strong whole. But they’re also imperfect. Even when computer modeling allowed engineers to recognize where particular forces might require more support or flexibility, wooden roller coasters are inherently imprecise; sawed and hammered and assembled by hand. It’s that inherent imperfection that makes wooden roller coasters feel like wooden roller coasters – rumbling and jostling as they roar down the track.
So what happens if you remove the imperfections altogether?
Intamin’s wooden roller coaster may have looked antique, but the technology behind it was all new. Prototyped via Germany’s Colossos, Intamin introduced the pre-fabricated wooden roller coaster. You won’t see the score marks of a saw at the end of its crossbars; no buttressed additions to its lattice of supports; no gaps between the layered timber of its track. Instead, Colossos was practically made in a laboratory.
Born of computer modeling, the timber made for Colossos was shipped to and treated in a factory. And there, its wooden pieces were literally cut and assembled with laser precision. Colossos arrived in Heide Park not as a pile of lumber, but as a finished product; pre-assembled, precision-fit pieces only in need of assembling. It’s no wonder fans took to describing the process as “plug-n-play.” Simplistic as it may sound, building Colossos was something like assembling a LEGO kit, merely snapping together pre-cut, pre-labeled sections and bolting them through pre-bored holes.
Standing 197 feet fall (just three feet short of becoming the world’s second wooden hypercoaster after Son of Beast), Colossos served not just as a landmark coaster, but as the unthinkable and indescribable first of something entirely new… a wooden roller coaster that felt like steel. Relentless, tear-jerking speed; incredible airtime; the kind of blissful, sleek, and powerful experience once reserved for steel coasters alone… right down to being the first wooden roller coaster with magnetic brakes at the ride’s end, bringing it to a smooth, comfortable finish.
It was something new… and something that could represent a major new weapon in the raging Coaster Wars back in the U.S. where, as part of a multi-year growth spurt, the once-demure Great Adventure had become a major battleground… Read on..
Greater Adventures
When last we left New Jersey’s Six Flags Great Adventure, it was still basking in the glow of 1979’s Rolling Thunder – that classic white woodie gracing the park. Suffice it to say that visiting the park 25 years later, Great Adventure would’ve looked unrecognizable. Sure, there had been the addition of a requisite Arrow multi-looper (1989’s Great American Scream Machine)…
But like the rest of its sisters in the Six Flags chain, Great Adventure’s metamorphosis into a roller coaster Mecca began in earnest in the ’90s with Batman: The Ride (a B&M inverted coaster) in 1993, Viper (a TOGO twister) in 1995, and the cutting-edge, dueling, LIM-launched Batman & Robin: The Chiller in 1998. The Premier coaster was prophetic, as the same year, Six Flags itself was purchased by an upstart operator called Premier Parks (unrelated to the coaster manufacturer) who renamed itself Six Flags Inc.
The new Six Flags Inc. was insatiable, rapidly purchasing parks across the U.S. and Europe and stuffing them with as many thrill rides as they could manage. At Great Adventure, that rapid expansion took the form of three landmark B&M additions: Medusa (the first of the company’s floorless coasters) in 1999, Nitro (an early hypercoaster) in 2001, and Superman: Ultimate Flight (a prototype flying coaster) in 2003. Given Great Adventure’s market – New York and Philadelphia – it makes sense that Six Flags’ new owners would identify it as a new flagship – even among their expanding lineup of coaster parks.
The park’s relentless, coasters-at-all-costs elevation was cemented in 2005 when Great Adventure was chosen over fellow corporate flagships Six Flags Magic Mountain in California and Six Flags Worlds of Adventure in Ohio to receive “the king of roller coasters,” Kingda Ka. Besting the previous record holder – Cedar Point’s Modern Marvel: Top Thrill Dragster – Great Adventure’s 456-foot tall, 128-mph launched Intamin stratacoaster became the tallest and fastest roller coaster in the world… certainly, an icon of the Coaster Wars.
At any other place and time, Kingda Ka would’ve marked the end of a park’s decade of exhaustive expansion. But in the Coaster Wars, slowing down and taking breath was a luxury most amusement parks couldn’t afford. As the first guests were stepping aboard Kingda Ka, the steel structure of the park’s pipeline-style Viper was being removed. Only its station – resembling an abandoned Spanish mission – remained.
On September 28, 2005, fans found out why…
Wood rises
As part of a brand new themed land called Plaza del Carnaval (also absorbing the now-dwarfed Rolling Thunder), Six Flags Great Adventure would become home to El Toro.
“Classic design meets state-of-the-art thrills with our spectacular, new wooden roller coaster,” said Rick McCurley, the park’s vice president and general manager. “As part of our multi-year expansion to a family destination, this massive coaster adventure will anchor a colorful, newly-themed area evoking the lively energy of Spanish-speaking regions of the world.”
Boasting a 176 foot drop and top speeds of 70 miles per hour, El Toro would become the second tallest and fastest wooden roller coaster on the continent (after Son of Beast), but would use Intamin’s pre-fabricated ride system to achieve an unimaginable 76° first drop (versus Son of Beast’s 55°).
From there, the ride would charge through 4,400 feet of track ‘inspired by the agility and strength of the brave Matadors,” cresting parabolic airtime hills no traditional wooden coaster could tackle. Fusing an out-and-back layout with a twister finale, El Toro would leap over its older sister Rolling Thunder with ease – representing in one single interaction just how far the wooden roller coaster had come in a quarter century.
Vertical construction began on El Toro just after its announcement, in September 2005. Thanks to Intamin’s “plug-n-play” technology, the ride’s 188-foot tall lift hill was topped off before Christmas.
The speedy assembly of pre-fabricated, pre-assembled sections of the ride also provided off-season construction tours with the unusual and distinct experience of seeing seemingly-unsupported sections of the coaster rise independently, gradually growing toward each other and eventually joining in jaw-dropping, pre-planned, perfect precision.
Though Intamin billed the ride’s pre-fabricated nature as a major benefit for the time and money saved in a relatively quick on-site installation process, there’s no question that the model more than made up for the money saved with the highly specialized process. Reportedly, El Toro’s total cost topped out at $28 million – $3 million more than Great Adventure had spent on Kingda Ka the year prior. Was it worth it? Let’s step aboard to find out…
Don’t fight it; ride it
Even from a distance, something about El Toro looks… different. Sure, it’s got all the makings of a wooden roller coaster – the lattice of lumber, the shuffling train stock, the distinctive sound… but El Toro seems to use those same ingredients in a way that looks… just… different.
Its first drop appears to the naked eye to be practically vertical; its parabolic hills are shaped more like a B&M hypercoaster than what you expect of wood. Even its lift hill looks as if it’s steeper than usual, as if someone stretched a typical wooden coaster vertically. And upon close inspection, there’s an unusual level of… maybe… symmetry?
Drawing closer, the supports that scaffold El Toro’s lift and first drop are practically geometric perfection, branching and fanning like fractals. Despite being tall and thin, El Toro somehow looks sturdier; more robust; more sure than you expect of wood.
Of course, all of that is possible because El Toro isn’t quite like other wooden roller coasters. Instead, Intamin’s unique engineering process means that El Toro looks different from other woodies because it is different, and can do things that its sisters cannot. As evidenced by the classic Rolling Thunder that looks like a kiddie ride in its shadow, El Toro is a ride that ignores the so-called limits of its genre and adds an addendum to the rule book. And it starts as soon as the ride does.
Dispatching from the station, the train coasts around the corner, aligning with El Toro’s lift hill. But if you expect a pulse-pounding climb to the apex to the sounds of a rattling chain and the ker-clunking of anti-rollback wedges, think again.
Borrowing from Intamin’s innovation on Cedar Point’s Millennium Force, El Toro ditches the leisurely lift in favor of a high speed cable lift. And unlike Millennium Force (where the elevator cable connects to the catch-car while guests load), El Toro’s lift connects to the train while it’s in motion. Once the first car of the train has passed over it, the cable springs into action, slotting into the catch car and beginning a 13.5 mile-per-hour ascent up the hill. In 16 seconds, it’s there. You might event get a little pop of airtime as the train crests the peak and levels out. After all, unlike a typical coaster, El Toro doesn’t send riders plummeting right away. Instead, it teases us with a view across Great Adventure’s safari park, turning toward Kingda Ka, then aligning with the ride’s out and back layout. Of course, there’s only way to get back: we have to go out.
Gradually gaining in speed, we reach the precipice, the track bending away below and out of sight. And just like that, El Toro plummets. It’s a legendary first drop: 176 feet and reaching 76 miles per hour… but more to the point, it’s blissful. Weightless. Glorious. And while you might expect to have to brace for the inevitable moment when the coaster will reconnect with the track, cratering into the downswing of the hill at full speed, it… doesn’t.
Instead, El Toro snakes through the valley with tremendous power and speed, but without any jackhammering or vibration. It’s… smooth.
Filled with fury, the bull charges ahead, racing up the ride’s second hill – still a staggering 112 feet tall. It barely looses a single shred of speed as it arcs over the ultra-tight hill, leaving riders with the terrifying and enviable experience known only as “ejector air.” Without so much as a breath, it thunders onward over a third hundred-foot-plus hill, the train tactilely pulling up away from the track (thanks for those up-stops, John!). So far, the train’s own airtime-fueled grip seems to be the only loss of speed to friction.
El Toro can’t be tamed. It bolts ahead, relentless. The ride’s fourth hill – and the furthest point of its out-and-back race toward the rest of the park – is still a substantial 82 feet tall. It tosses riders to the ride, rumbling through a descending turnaround, then rising back up to realign with the narrow layout’s footprint. El Toro dives into a series of stretched parabolas, dipping into the ride’s superstructure As it races back into the cradle of the ride’s first drop and the general direction of the station, you might expect the ride to give up, sending the train tearing back into magnetic brakes to shed its speed and send us home.
But nope. El Toro rises a final time (until Rolling Thunder was removed in 2013, leaping over[!] its first drop), then races to ground level. The ride now enters its grand finale – the bull’s last attempt to buck us pesky riders once and for all. A hidden, spur, out-and-back segment clings to the grass, trading airtime for laterals.
The bull banks left, then right, tossing us side to side in a wild ode to wooden twisters of old… (and maybe, a test case in the lead up to Intamin’s next ride, 2007’s Maverick at Cedar Point). It dips and slaloms in a wild last chase, all edged within the layout of Rolling Thunder. But as it makes a final leap into the brakes, the unstoppable speed of El Toro finally evaporates. Using every single joule of energy it gained in its climb a minute earlier, the ride retains just enough momentum to take the final dip back to the station.
You’d be forgiven for being speechless upon returning to that old Spanish mission station. El Toro is fierce and wild; untamed and furious. Yet it’s also sleek and smooth; unafraid to toss riders around, bolting them up and yanking them down hills in ways usually reserved only for its steel cousins. Because while there’s no question that El Toro is a wooden roller coaster, it doesn’t feel like it. It’s legendary. Astounding. Perspective-shifting.
And at least for a moment, it seemed possible that in El Toro, the future of the wooden roller coaster was laid bare; that Intamin’s pre-fabricated wooden coasters might’ve been the solution the industry needed to send wooden coasters past their long-imagined limits at last… Then, everything changed…
Further innovations
For decades, wooden roller coasters had tried to keep up with steel, outgrowing their own ambitions in a doomed raced to remain headliners aside their increasingly-varied steel siblings and the pressurized context of the Coaster Wars.
At least in that moment, it must’ve seemed that Intamin had cracked the code for translating wooden roller coasters to the 21st century. “If only Kings Island had waited another years or two,” discussion boards read, “then Son of Beast could’ve been pre-fabricated, and might be the world’s best wooden coaster.” It seemed possible! Now precision-built just like their steel siblings, perhaps a new generation of wooden rides would spread across the industry!
But… they didn’t. El Toro’s 2006 opening made it the third of an eventual four Intamin pre-fabricated wooden roller coasters (joining Colossos at Heide Park in Germany, Balder at Sweden’s Liseberg, and eventually, T Express at Korea’s Everland).
Part of the reason is probably the extravagant cost of the Intamin pre-fabricated model. We’re lucky that in the midst of the “Coaster Wars,” parks bragged about rides’ budgets instead of downplaying them. That’s how we know, you’ll remember, that El Toro came in at a whopping $28 million – $3 million more than Kingda Ka had cost the year prior. That made pre-fabricated wooden roller coasters easily among the most luxurious purchases in the already-supercharged market of the era. For $3 – 5 million less, a park could get an Intamin giga (like 2010’s Intimidator 305, coming in at “just” $25 million.)
Of course, the other major reason is that, as the Coaster Wars cooled, the race to build ultra-extreme coasters of any type slowed significantly. For “woodies,” the depressurized market saw a fork in the road, with two likely paths forward.
Great Coasters International
The first is arguably the path represented by Pennsylvania-based Great Coasters International, or GCI. Though GCI was responsible for some of those “overgrown” wooden coasters of the ’90s, they arguably found their niche as the Coaster Wars cooled, around 2010. GCIs of the last decade are among the most excellent, well-aged, and personality-filled installations this century, sliding beautifully into parks’ lineups, and into what we call the “New Coaster Wars” (when personality and park-fit matter more than world records.)
Rides like Prowler (Worlds of Fun), Gold Striker (California’s Great America), Invadr (Busch Gardens Williamsburg), Wicker Man (Alton Towers), Texas Stingray (SeaWorld San Antonio), and Mystic Timbers (Kings Island) beautifully embody GCI’s modern lineup: delightful, dipping, laughter-inducing, terrain-following, lateral-packed rides that embrace what’s great about wooden coasters, and pack it all into hundred-ish foot installations that embrace their family-friendliness rather than reaching for extremes.
Not groundbreaking, much less record-breaking… but solid, stable, perfectly-sized installations to fit into parks’ ride collections.
Rocky Mountain Construction
The other path for “woodies,” of course, comes via Rocky Mountain Construction, or RMC. For RMC, it all started with one of those big, overgrown, unpopular, “jackhammering” liabilities leftover from the ’90s: the 143-foot-tall Texas Giant at Six Flags Over Texas. For $10 million – far, far less than even the most modest new coaster might’ve cost – RMC was brought in to experiment with a brand new concept…
In a then-novel process, RMC essentially re-used and built upon the existing Texas Giant wooden support structure, but affixed to it their patented, blazing red “I-Box” steel track, arranged in a new, reborn layout.
Sleek, serpentine, extreme, and extraordinary, there’s no question at all that RMC’s I-Box track makes the resulting ride – 2011’s New Texas Giant – steel and not wood. But frankly, it was the biggest thing to happen to wooden coasters since Intamin’s pre-fabricated structure debuted a decade before. And more to the point, RMC’s revelatory process meant that suddenly, those big, overgrown, unpopular “jackhammering,” wooden coasters of the ’90s weren’t liabilities anymore; they were opportunities.
Year after year, more and more of those aggressive, over-grown ’90s woodies we listed a page ago (Rattler; Hurler; Psyclone; Roar; Wildcat; Mean Streak) are “RMC’ed,” each emerging from its wood-to-steel metamorphosis as an award-winning, park-anchoring, best-in-class headliner (Iron Rattler; Twisted Timbers; Twisted Psyclone; Joker; Wildcat’s Revenge; Steel Vengeance… RMC has also used wooden structure and steel I-Box track to create from-scratch rides, no “leftovers” needed.)
In addition to their steel I-Box track, RMC also offers a track system called Topper Track. Essentially, Topper Track works off the same principle as any wooden coaster track – layers of stacked, laminated wood. However, Topper Track replaces the top two layers of lumber with a thicker steel “box” – a modern reinterpretation of the metal strip that a wooden coaster’s wheels run along. After much initial consternation, fans have landed on a fairly unanimous agreement that rides with Topper Track (left, above) count unambiguously as wooden coasters…
…Which is exactly what makes RMC’s wooden coasters so extraordinary. To date, Topper Track has been used on four from-scratch builds. The first – 2013’s Outlaw Run at Silver Dollar City – includes an 81° drop and three inversions – the first inversions on a wooden roller coaster since Son of Beast’s wood-tracked loop in 2000. Three years later, Dollywood’s Lightning Rod opened as the world’s first launched wooden roller coaster, made possible by Topper Track. (It has since converted a little over half of its track to I-Box, making the ride a true wood/steel hybrid.)
The point is that whether via steel I-Box track conversion or wood Topper Track construction, RMC offered a significant path forward for the more extreme evolutionary line of the wooden coaster versus GCI’s more classic variation.
Once upon a time, the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray co-existed, each vying to become the format of the future. And like Blu-Ray’s eventual emergence as a clear winner, it’s obvious in retrospect that RMC offered too great a solution for wooden roller coasters (be it conversion or evolution) for Intamin’s more expensive, pre-fabricated track to beat. The future of wooden coasters lay not in pre-fabricated structures, but in the delightful odes to yesteryear by GCI and the malleable, adaptable new track technologies & bold new elements pioneered by RMC.
And more to the point, RMC debuted just as Intamin’s pre-fabricated creations started to fall apart…
Pre-fab falters
As coaster enthusiasts know all too well, Intamin is no stranger to engineering issues. After the breakneck pace of the Coaster Wars (and Intamin’s infamous push for innovation and technological integration), issues arose across the manufacturer’s portfolio.
Suffice it to say that after significant operational and engineering issues, Intamin has gotten next to no business from Cedar Fair or Six Flags post-Coaster Wars . From frazzled control systems to frayed launch & lift cables; unpredicted forces to complete reprofiling and rebuilding of entire track sections, Intamin’s boundary-pushing rides have often become significant albatrosses for the parks that bet big on them. And unfortunately, that includes El Toro…
The first of Intamin’s pre-fabricated wooden roller coasters – Colossos – opened at Germany’s Heide Park in 2001. Fifteen years later, in 2016, the ride was very suddenly shuttered. Inspections from Germany’s engineering oversight body, TÜV, reportedly found “significant problems” with the coaster’s track, deeming it structurally unsound and inoperable. A year into the landmark ride standing-but-not-operating, Heide Park published estimates that the ride would cost at least €10 million to repair – a jaw-dropping sum for a 15 year old ride.
It wasn’t until 2018 that they made the decision to proceed. For a total of €12 million, Intamin reportedly replaced all 4,409 feet of track. The coaster relaunched in 2019 as Colossos: Kampf der Giganten, adding a new story and special effects. At least the three years of closure positioned the ride’s revival as a major offering in its own right.
Unfortunately, that was just a hint of what was to befall El Toro.
On June 29, 2021, one of El Toro’s trains partially derailed when the rear car’s up-stop wheels – yes, that John Miller invention from 102 years earlier – moved out of place and up onto the track. All riders were safely evacuated, but an investigation by Intamin on the cause of the derailment was not made public. Instead, Six Flags and Intamin agreed that the findings were “proprietary.” El Toro remained closed for the rest of 2021.
The ride re-opened with the park for the 2022 season in April, but on August 25, 2022, another substantial malfunction occurred near the ride’s end. Insiders suggest that El Toro suffered from the same kind of incident as that was alleged to have occurred on Son of Beast in 2006, when a snapped or weakened support beam allegedly caused a section of track to sag, creating a violent jolt for riders.
Fourteen riders were injured, with five severe enough to be taken to the hospital for further evaluation and treatment. A woman who said she was on the roller coaster at the time posted about the experience on the Great Adventure Connoisseurs Facebook group. “It felt like it hit a pothole,” she said. “A lot of people said they bit their tongue. A few said their backs were hurting and a couple of people said they couldn’t breathe for a bit. I thought I might have cracked a tooth.”
Five days after the incident, Six Flags reported that its internal investigation suggested that the ride’s safety systems were working properly and that as soon as El Toro was repaired, it would reopen. Unfortunately, they spoke too soon.
An anonymous ride operator spoke to New York’s CBS station with damning allegations regarding the alleged structural failure. “El Toro was riding very, very rough since the beginning of the day,” they said. “From what I know, maintenance has known about it and they have tried fixing it. But for how it is, it just keeps happening. The employees keep telling them that there is an issue with the pothole and maintenance has done nothing about it.”
In September 2022, New Jersey’s Department of Community Affairs conducted its state inspection on the ride, declaring El Toro was “structurally compromised,” effectively closing it indefinitely. For a second year in a row, the 16-year old ride was shuttered. Given the €12 million investment needed to re-open Colossos at its 15-year mark, fans couldn’t help but wonder aloud if El Toro had fought its last fight. Or more to the point, if Intamin’s next-generation woodie might be a candidate to be RMC’ed itself.
“El Toro is one of our signature attractions, and we are working diligently toward reopening the ride this summer following testing and a full safety inspection by both internal and external experts,” the park’s spokesperson said in March 2023. And to Six Flags’ credit, it did. El Toro returned to operation nearly a year after its incident, on June 17 2023. But even the most optimistic coaster enthusiasts have to wonder…
The running of the bull
How much fight does El Toro really have left? At this rate, should we really expect El Toro and its pre-fab sisters to survive a until the 2050s – with all the longevity of the still-legendary classics of the ’70s – much less living a century and beyond like their shared ancestors from the ’20s?
If Intamin’s pre-fabricated woodie was ever the solution fans believed – a surefire way to finally propel wooden coasters past the genre’s inherent upper limits – then surely we can agree it was a temporary one. It turns out that despite feeling like steel at their best, these rides surely need cared for like the wooden coasters they are. And for $28 million+ with a 50% rate of significant issues across the model, is it any wonder that GCI and RMC have moved in, keeping Intamin’s pre-fab woodie count at just four?
In any case, El Toro is a force to be reckoned with. One of a kind in the U.S., it provides an experience and sensation most riders – even seasoned coaster enthusiasts – have simply never felt before. It’s powerful and furious, but graceful and sleek. Iconic and formidable, it’s a Bucket List landmark; one of a small group of coasters that can be recognized by silhouette alone. So while the deck may seem stacked against this very strange woodie, if any coaster has the fight to survive, we wouldn’t write off El Toro being the one…
