Keeping track of wooden coasters
I went to Lake Compounce and experienced two ride makeovers. Here are my thoughts.
Tomorrow (Friday, August 30) will be the monthly “What’s the Attraction” discussion thread that is exclusively for paid subscribers. (Kindly consider joining this wonderful group. It’d mean the world to me, and you’ll get fun, exclusive content.) With Labor Day upon us, it’s time to get reflective. What were your most memorable park adventures this summer season? That’ll be the topic of tomorrow’s thread. Please gather your thoughts, and plan to share your thoughts.
Over time, wooden coasters deteriorate and need some TLC to restore them to their glory. With apologies to Elvis, chances are you’ve been all shook up many times during excessively rough rides on woodies. Give me a “hell yeah” if a ride has put you through the wringer. (Hmm. Just mixed my rock and roll and wrestling allusions. Sorry about that.) Since coasters first began rolling, parks have been routinely replacing track sections to remove the “potholes,” mitigate the “washboarding,” stop the “jackhammering,” and otherwise prevent passengers from having to book appointments with their chiropractors. In some cases, they’ve given up altogether and bulldozed the unruly beasts. More recently, coaster manufacturers have come up with innovative solutions to tackle the age-old problem.
I trekked to the oldest continuously operating amusement park in the U.S., Connecticut’s lovely Lake Compounce, to hop aboard two rides, each of which has had ride docs perform a different type of newfangled wooden coaster surgery on it. I’m here to report that in both cases the patients have recovered quite nicely.
When visitors emerge from Lake Compounce’s entrance tunnel, they are greeted by the graceful, white lattice structure of Wildcat, the wooden coaster that has been one of the park’s highlights since 1927. During its long tenure, coaster caretakers have been engaged in the never-ending struggle to keep Wildcat’s rough ride demons at bay. But the task became considerably more difficult when the park switched to a heavier train with a different configuration in 2017. Attempts at patchwork fixes just didn’t do the job, so the park decided to shutter Wildcat in 2023 and overhaul much of it.
It considered some of the hybrid re-tracking solutions that incorporate steel (we’ll get to one of those later in this article), but settled on an intriguing, if more traditional, approach: precut vertical wooden track provided by the wooden coaster specialists at The Gravity Group.
“The decision was made to go with The Gravity Group,” says Jerry Brick, director of construction and maintenance at lake Compounce’s parent company, Palace Entertainment, “mostly because Wildcat is almost 100 years old, and we really felt that it was best to leave it as a wood coaster.”
Instead of the stack of horizontal boards that comprised Wildcat’s track (and virtual every other woodie), the new track contains boards that are turned 90 degrees onto their sides, which make them considerably stronger and more durable. In addition to switching out the existing track, the park also redesigned about a third of the layout, tweaking it a bit to conform to more modern standards. When I visited the park, I noticed that in addition to the new vertical track, some sections had new horizontal track, while others left the original horizontal track intact.
So, what is the ride experience like on the reborn Wildcat? It is a revelation. Instead of the crazy-rough ride to which it had devolved, the grand dame is once again a delight. There is some glorious airtime that had me screaming like a ninny and grinning from ear to ear. It is smooth, but also delivers the good kind of rough and tumble that is the hallmark of a great wooden coaster. I imagine it must be something akin to what folks experienced back in the Jazz Age when Wildcat first opened.
That is, the ride was wild and wonderful until its final quarter. Things turned rough, and not in the good wooden coaster kind of way, when it became evident that the new track had given way to the original, traditional track. Brick confirms that the restoration work was done on about the first 78% of the 2,746-foot-long track. And, the construction director notes, there are plans to have The Gravity Group finish the job this offseason.
“It was the right thing that we did, and the right way to go,” Brick adds. “Once we finish the last pieces, it’s really going to be a great ride.”
Amen to that.
Behind Wildcat, nestled into the mountain that borders one side of Lake Compounce is Boulder Dash. When it first opened in 2000, I (along with many other journalists and ride warriors) heralded it as one of parkdom’s best wooden coasters. Slung low to the terrain and following the contours of the mountain, it rockets out towards the park’s namesake lake, then turns around and tears back to the station. The wonderfully designed ride seems to defy physics and maintains its ferocious speed and energy until the train hits the brakes.
But those fierce forces and real-world physics do a number on Boulder Dash’s tracks. It’s had extensive retracking and other rehab work performed on it through the years. The relentless wear and tear imposed by the 60-mph ride, however, compelled the park to try something different. Rather than going with prefabricated vertical wooden track, it opted for Titan Track, an all-steel product developed by Great Coasters International. It is similar to Rocky Mountain Construction’s I-Box track. Rather than finesse the existing wooden track, GCI rips out sections of wooden track and replaces it with its flat-topped steel track.
Unlike Wildcat, which has had about 80% of its track replaced, GCI has switched out about 900 feet, or about 20% of Boulder Dash’s wooden rails with Titan Track. And like Wildcat, it’s obvious where the subbed-in track ends and the original track takes over.
Coming down the mountain for the first drop, Boulder Dash is smooth as glass until it roars past the station. Then, bam! It transitions to wood and the shimmying, shaking, banging, and balking begins. At times, the ride is brutally rough, especially in comparison to the gliding-on-air sensation of the first drop. There is a brief respite near the halfway-point turnaround where GCI installed a small section of Titan Track, but then the jiggling and juddering resumes.
“Our goal is to get some more Titan Track on there,” Brick says. He adds that ride manufacturer PTC will also be rehabbing one of the coaster’s trains in the offseason, which should also help improve the ride.
As one of the world’s finest wooden coasters, Boulder Dash deserves all the attention and resources Lake Compounce can lavish on it. I say bring on the Titan Track–the more the merrier.
This was my first experience riding on coasters that have been modified with either Titan Track or precut vertical wooden track. I can say unequivocally that they both work great. From a purist’s perspective, the Gravity Group’s wooden track preserves the integrity of the wooden coaster mystique. But really, it’s all about the ride experience, right? The important thing is to restore and maintain the woodies that are out there. Here’s to Lake Compounce for acknowledging the jewels on their midway and taking action to burnish them for generations to come.
Have you experienced either Titan Track or vertical wooden track? Have you been on either Boulder Dash or Wildcat? What woodies do you think could benefit from either of these solutions?
I rode Boulder Dash when it first opened and loved it but it has been quite awhile. I'll have to get back and try out both that and Wildcat to experience their updates!
I'm not saying anything everyone doesn't already know, but man would I love to see Hurler at Carowinds get *some* kind of overhaul. Whether that be some track replacement or just bulldozed and replaced with a cool little family GCI like InvadR.
While it's certainly not as rough as some other old woodies out there, it's still not great and has only gotten worse over the years.