Carowinds

Since the park was owned directly by Paramount in the previous season, much of the park retains Paramount orientated themes. For example, rides take themes from Paramount movies such as Top Gun and the Star Trek franchise, or Paramount companies such as Nickelodeon. Some of the older rides maintain their names from prior to the Paramount acquisition.

One thing that struck me as bizarre is the excessive use of seat-belts on all rides where a lap-bar was in use. I’m presuming this is an insurance requirement; however it’s been proven for many years now that a lap-bar is perfectly safe, even on a ride with inversions. The seat-belts considerably slow down loading and unloading of the trains.

The park once was home to the older version of Walibi’s Turbine, known as White Lightnin’, which used a weight-drop launch system rather than a fly-wheel launch system. I’m a little disappointed because I’d love to feel the difference. On the other hand, the park contains a ride that Walibi removed…

After entering the park, the first ride I headed for was the Xtreme Skyflyer, an older and twinned version of the Skydiver ride that I loved at Walibi. Despite being a pay-per-experience ride, I was more than happy to pay USD$15 to get on this thing. There were some slight differences, such as being supported on two wires rather than one for stability, but the ride itself was as exhilarating as I remembered.

Each ride is videoed; ready to be purchased as a DVD for a ridiculous free once you’re done.

From there, it was time to start working my way through the coasters. I was strongly encouraged to take my first ride on the Hurler, a wooden coaster from 1994 with a top speed of 80km/h. The ride features a decent amount of airtime and some very tightly banked corners, which unfortunately provoke a very bumpy ride.

The Hurler was once themed as the Wayne’s World studio, with the nearby Happy Days diner being the diner from the movie with the giant ice-hockey player on the roof. I’m not quite sure how this bumpy coaster actually fit into the theme, though.

One of my colleagues brought his two eldest sons along, who were around the age of 10, so from there, we moved onto the Carolina Goldrusher, a fairly quirky mine train from 1973 with steel tracks built on a wooden frame. The ride has some typical mine train elements, including shallow drops, two lift hills and rapidly banking turns. Being a really old Arrow ride, it unfortunately has great elements that don’t last long enough to be really noticed.

The other wooden coaster at Carowinds is Thunder Road, originally built in 1976. The coaster has fantastic airtime, but is again quite bumpy. The coaster is a twin (racing) coaster that originally had two trains departing at the same time, oriented in the same direction. These days, one of the trains has the cars orientated backwards so you can decide which direction you’d rather be facing as you ride.

This ride has had a good track record, considering its history. The most recent accident on this ride was in April of 1999, when seven people were injured after a train rear-ended another at the station due to sensor failure and poor controller design.

Thunder Road is also interesting in that it actually crosses the state border into South Carolina; therefore riders actually ride into South Carolina and then return to North Carolina.

The Vortex is a standing coaster which two inversions, the second of which is very tight corkscrew and quite stiff. This is my first standing coaster experience, which I will admit is very bizarre. For those that have never ridden one, the harness is adjusted vertically to match your height, and unfortunately this process makes loading and unloading extremely slow.

With two trains, the Vortex should technically have a high turnover of riders, but by the time one train has completed the ride of just over two minutes, the other train has only just unloaded.

With the ride’s box-steel frame, typical of B&M rides of the early 1990s, makes a hell of a lot of noise which can be heard around most of the park, and I’m told it’s designed to sound like a tornado.

The Vortex isn’t the strangest new riding experience I’ve had, as Carowinds provided my first lying/flying coaster: The BORG Assimilator. This bizarre and enormous ride is actually a prototype of a Vekoma Flying Dutchman. I enjoyed this thing so much I had to end the day with it!

The ride is themed from the Star Trek species known as Borg, a collective consciousness of nasty bio-mechanical beings which assimilate other species unwillingly into their “collective” by injecting them with nanobots that use their immune system to create mechanical implants that take over their mind and convert them into drones.

The track itself rides you up the lift hill in the lying position, and then executes a rapid lie-to-fly roll into a smooth horseshoe, then a fly-to-lie roll into a perfect loop where for a moment you’re actually in a standing position. From there, you’re flying again through two corkscrews and returned to a lying position before returning to the station.

The interesting thing about this type of ride is that no matter where you are in the ride, your view is unobstructed and the ride is smooth. Each car is loaded and unloaded in a seated position at the station, with the seats then lowered into a lying position before the train departs.

This added complexity actually proved problematic not too long ago. On the evening of Saturday March 17, while the park was closed, several Carowinds employees were taken to hospital after the ride computer executed an emergency stop at the bottom of a loop, and the lap-bars disengaged releasing the riders. The ride forced the emergency stop after the seats unlocked, as the ride operator has pressed the button to raise the seats into the seated position. Vekoma have since modified the ride so that this cannot happen while the train is in motion.

The big problem with the BORG Assimilator is the sun. When riding around mid-day, you’ll leave the ride blind. When riding in the afternoon, you’ll ride blind since the lift-hill will face you towards the afternoon sun. I guess they didn’t think about that, or couldn’t solve it because of the park layout.

Carowinds has some other odd rides, such as the Nickelodeon themed Flying Super Saturator, a small suspended coaster with a top speed of around 50km/h. Four riders are arranged on a small hanging car, with two on the front and two on the back, each with their own tube filled with water (from the station) that they can drop on people below.

Since people waiting in the queue and around the ride are susceptible to attack from above, retaliation comes in the form of water cannons dotted within the queue and around the ride, ready to target riders who think they’re safe.

Compare to this tiny suspended coaster, the Top Gun lies at the other extreme. To me, this feels like a Vekoma SLC (like Walibi’s Vampire) multiplied by two. Reaching a top speed of 100km/h, the ride pushes the g-forces nicely through similar but more consistent elements compared to the smaller Vekoma SLC.

From a technical perspective, the ride is curious because not only do they photograph you, but each car on the train contains two video cameras and microphones (with infrared illumination for night riding). These record your ride, and download them over a wireless LAN so you can purchase a DVD as a souvenir. I know a certain Irish guy who would collect these things like crazy!

The final suspended coaster at the park is the Rugrats Runaway Reptar, which is simply a standard Vekoma SFC. This model is essentially a slightly smaller SLC with no inversions, designed to be friendly enough for the same crowd that would normally ride on the mine train coasters.

Returning to traditional sit-down coasters, the Carolina Cyclone is an aging steel beast from 1980, providing four inversions (two loops and a double corkscrew). The ride is a typical late-1970s design from Arrow, despite being custom built for the park. Curiously, a marketing department has evidently intervened in the naming of this ride because Americans use the word Hurricane to describe a Cyclone!

The cyclone, like most steel coasters of its time, is very stiff and bumps you around. Riding this a few times is likely to give most people a headache, since the steel tracks for these rides were normally calculated by hand; therefore yaw and banking calculations suffered significantly.

The park also has a wild mouse (or mad mouse) style coaster, the Ricochet; a design which pops up everywhere in the world. These things are a lot of fun, since the front wheels of each car are moved closer to the middle in order to make tight corners feel tighter and give a sensation of nearly going over the edge.

Moving away from coasters, I had to try the Drop Zone Stunt Tower, which is identical to Walibi’s Dalton Terror except that Carowinds actually have one which is 100% working, and has been painted rather than rusting away.

The ride is slightly different to the Dalton, as the brakes engage somewhat sharply at the end of the drop rather than Dalton’s smoother braking. Perhaps the Dalton simply slows down because of rust, but at least it gives the impression of greater airtime.

Finally, something you don’t see anywhere else these days, is the Southern Star — mostly known as the Pirate Ship, particularly at carnivals. My sister used to love this thing when she was younger, but this one unfortunately combined a nasty lap-bar with a painfully heavy metal loop-harness for the chest, lending to an uncomfortable ride. These slow upside-down rides always amuse me for the amount of coins that falls after entering the first inversion.

At the end of the day, I missed out on a few rides, such as the Fairly Odd Coaster (which I didn’t even see) and some other carnival style rides that are everywhere. I’d recommend the park, especially if the queues are barely existent and the weather fairly reasonable like today.

Carowinds is a fairly crowded park as far as rides, sideshows and food/drink places are concerned. Coasters come very close to each other, and almost always overlap paths.

After arriving at the park around 10am and leaving at 7pm, it was a relief to go out to try some Southern food at Cracker Barrel.

If work sends me over here again, I might try to either return, or give Six Flags over Georgia a try!