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Heide Park Colossos retracking (2019)

Any excuse for me to bash merlin but it kinda sums up the company when they own one of the worlds best woodies and run it to the point of disrepair only to build another inferior woodie in a sister park. Such a shame but I have very little faith in Merlin ever opening this ride again.
 
Mysterious Sue said:
Could it be anything to do with the rumoured woodworm? If so, that's totally avoidable and just bad maintenance.
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Avoidable with proper planning, but expensive to fix once the boards are ruined. Had they done the maintenanceright from the start, it would have been a non-issue, but if the damage is already done and they have to replace half the coaster, it's a tougher decision financially.
 
If they make the wrong decision that the ride has had it's day, they could at least get RMC to rebuild it and take the tallest record from Mean Streak right after it opens...
Of course they won't, but it would take some of the pain of losing Colossos away </3
 
Heide Park is considering demolishing Colossos.

The future of Europe's largest wooden roller coaster does not look bright. Colossos at Heide Park needs a very costly repair. Therefore, the park considers various scenarios, including the demolition of the iconic roller coaster. This is evidenced by an interview with a German fansite.

The largest wooden roller coaster in Europe has been SBNO since July 2016 for urgent maintenance and repair work. Earlier this year, Heide Park announced that Colossos will remain closed throughout the 2017 season. Any details could not be released, but a spokesman from the park said that "it's a replacement of the roller coaster track, which is a very difficult job. An opening date is not known yet, but we keep everyone informed as soon as there is more news," said the spokeswoman.

Last weekend, a conversation took place with the fansite "Freizeitpark-Welt" and some Heide Park managers. Inaddition, the park will come out with an official verdict regarding the future ofColossos at the end of this year. It was also said that the repair of the roller coaster is accompanied by a repaircost which is a two-digit million amount, so a very expensive repair.

The park is now looking with its investors and company Merlin Entertainments which decision they are going to make. There are currently different scenarios possible, including demolishing the roller coaster to replace it with a brand new attraction.

http://www.pretparken.be/NL/article/1824/Toekomst Europa
 
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Well if it's going to take them 10+ milion to repair it, might aswell put a brand new woody in it's place.
 
Zwoopaman said:
Well if it's going to take them 10+ milion to repair it, might aswell put a brand new woody in it's place.
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Yeah, I was going to say this. A GCI would be much more economically viable in almost all aspects; construction/initial costs, maintenance, space...

If SW8 turns out to be a good investment, I'm willing to bet money more Merlin parks will get GCIs.

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I hope it stays, it is the tallest wooden coaster in the world after all. What I'd like to see is for them to use what they can of the structure, keep the general layout but maybe boost the height by 4 ft so it tops 200ft and re-do the first drop so it makes full use of the height. Merlin could even market it as new colossos - taller, faster, steeper, and it would probably take most of the world records for wooden coasters too.
 
This is what neglect does to wood in the long run. Pinch a penny in maintenance, watch the value of the object drop by a pound. It's sad to see deterioration to this level, to the point of the park needing more than 10 million Euros, presumably to put it back in the condition it was in 2001. And to be blunt, the coaster they built in 2001 has already entertained the crowds. Restoring it would still only bring back old news. The return on the investment would be marginal. Financially, it'd make more sense to spend the money on a decently-sized new coaster (€10 million should get you at least a couple of smooth inversions and a few dozen kph of top speed), and leave Colossos to the tooth of time. Or maybe just pulling it down and recycling it for plywood, I suppose.

It's a shame to see the world's tallest wooden coaster come to this sad end... twice. Wonder if we should begin to worry about T-Express now?

daviddoc said:
What I'd like to see is for them to use what they can of the structure, keep the general layout but maybe boost the height by 4 ft so it tops 200ft and re-do the first drop so it makes full use of the height.
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What are those "ft" things you keep talking about? Is it related to a furlong, a horse-length or a sheppey? In Germany, or for that matter everywhere but the US, Myanmar, and to certain degrees the UK, nobody cares about round numbers in the Imperial system. And vice versa, I suppose, seeing as Cedar Fair built a 99.1 m tall coaster a couple of years ago...
 
Everyone always forgets about Liberia.... poor Liberia

However being just as picky as you were :p That's a massive over simplification. The USA uses metric measurements for a fair amount. They have to for trade purposes and all government organisations are supposed to. (doesnt always work though look up Mars Climate Orbiter)

Conversely there are tons (pun intended) of industries that still use Imperial units. Things like photography equipment, TV/Monitor screen sizes, tyre pressures, lumber sizes etc etc are all often still done Imperial units.

And roller coasters traditionally have done too I guess. Hyper and Giga coaster definitions certainly do. its not really a question of ease its just how its always been done.

Ok pedant time over. I'm going for a pint :p
 
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Well, despite all TV being labelled in cm and tire pressure indicated in hPa in most european countries, I think the real point is that nobody should care about round numbers, in any unit system. Not just because round numbers are mathematically irrelevant, but also because every unit system is arbitrary and flawed.
In my (former) line of work, the only distance unit we cared about was the second, which is roughly equal to 300 thousand kilometers, almost the distance between earth and moon. Not really practical for everyday mesurements, but it is physically way more natural as you don't have to use complicated conversion constants between redondant units. I won't start mesuring coaster height in nanoseconds thought, as it would be quite unfamiliar for most.
 
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balrog said:
Well, despite all TV being labelled in cm and tire pressure indicated in hPa in most european countries, I think the real point is that nobody should care about round numbers, in any unit system. Not just because round numbers are mathematically irrelevant, but also because every unit system is arbitrary and flawed.
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I thought that was the point of the SI system, though - to make these not "flawed" and all tied back to fundamental, unchanging, constants? Although I will agree on the "arbitrary" statement, and the apathy towards round numbers. ;)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SI_base_unit

I have nothing further to add on the topic subject itself. :p
 
Hixee said:
I thought that was the point of the SI system, though - to make these not "flawed" and all tied back to fundamental, unchanging, constants? Although I will agree on the "arbitrary" statement, and the apathy towards round numbers. ;)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SI_base_unit

I have nothing further to add on the topic subject itself. :p
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Unchanging, yeah, but fundamental ? Not really. The units have been retrospectively defined to fit as closely as possible to previously existing metric units, and that is why you get some really strange definitions involving absurd constants.
For example, a case could be made about the uselessness of having two different space-time interval measurement units, the meter and the second, that are completely redundant. But the worst part is the definition of the meter as 1/299792458 second. Where in hell does this ridiculous 299792458 come from ? This is not much better than the definition of the mile as 5280 feet.
The definition of the second itself doesn't make much more sense : the duration of 9192631770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom. This is really ugly. Using radiations from a heavy atom like caesium is quite unsettling, and this 9192631770 factor has nothing fundamental.
Let alone the kilogram, still defined from a prototype object.
And there are some other, completely redundant units, like the Kelvin, which has a weird water related definition and is actually just a proportional to the Joule with some not even integer constant - actually, it is not even fixed yet.

And yeah, sorry for the ongoing off topic talk.
 
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