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what type of engineering for roller coasters?

What do you mean? For design?

Mostly mechanical engineering, if not all actually. There is some civil based aspects of projects, but the 'true' roller coaster design is mechanical engineering.

I will say as a word of warning though (looking at your age), don't pick your career based on wanting to design roller coasters. I'd love to do it, and I'll try my hardest to get that dream, but I still have an interest in the other applications of mechanical engineering. That isn't the reason I picked the course I am on. Just saying, I don't mean it in a criticising way.

But yeah, to answer your question, mechanical engineering is the type you would need for engineering. ;)
 
I'm not sure why, but this is reminding me of parents' evening a couple of weeks ago when the mum of a girl who is predicted straight E grades at GCSE was asking about Cambridge.
 
The specific qualifications you would need depend on what you want to do, but generally speaking you need to start small and work your way up from there. I am a Mechanical Engineer and for the moment, that qualifies me, along with my experience, to maintain and inspect rides.

When it comes to designing a machine, one single qualification won't get you very far as one new design may be worked on by a whole bunch of people from mechanical engineers to structural and civil engineers.
 
Companies such as Intamin, B&M etc. who design and build ride systems will hire mechanical, electrical and 'structural' (basically civil) engineers. Companies like Stengel who design and engineer layouts will hire Mechanical and electrical. Parks themselves will hire pretty much all branches as well as graphic designers so they can maintain and repair the rides.

So it depends what you want to do specifically, and obviously all businesses have different requirements. As Hixee said it's always going to be a long shot, but it's what I hope to do too. I've always thought I'll take my interest as far as I can, and if i still enjoy the engineering aspect as much as the enthusiast side then there'll be lots of other areas I could go into. No point in giving up!
 
I don't mean to sound negative but I became less of an enthusiast the more I became an Engineer. When you maintain rides, you spend less time appreciating them, more time swearing at them. That still doesn't mean I don't enjoy it, there's nothing I'd rather be doing.
 
^^ thanks for that UC, i imagined this would happen if i ever manage get a job in maintenace but i really do enjoy watching, learning about and maintaining things. I can see why it could happen if you are surrounded by the subject of work in your spare time, it could easily become tiresome.

I wonder if anybody on this forum has ever made it to become some part of a design team? i would like to think that at least one person who has declared thier love for designing coasters has actually achieved thier lifes purpose!
 
I am looking for structural engineering companies list, I just passed out in civil engineering and want to send my resumes to there to see if they have any opening in the structural engg. Field.
 
I certainly recommend searching the internet and posting on random forums that have nothing to do with structural engineering, it's a sure-fire winning starting point. It's definitely a unique approach that very few will have ever tried before, so you're standing out from the crowd.

Are you moving into structural engineering because civil engineering caused unconsciousness? Is it a health move? It's probably a pretty decent idea to be honest if you kept on passing out. Also, the closest we have to a civil engineer on here is UC... Well, he's an engineer but rarely described as civil, maybe not an uncivil engineer, but "vaguely pent up aggressive attitude towards stupidity" engineer? SoI can see why, if civil engineers are like that, why you'd be spending most of your time in a faint.

This may not be quite as useful as you first hoped, and I'm sorry that a rollercoaster enthusiast forum can't quite achieve structural enlightenment, in fact, structured sarcasm may be about as far as you get... Unless you pretend to be female, in which case you'll have a good dozen PMs from people all wanted to add you to Facebook and help you out as much as they can. It's always worth considering you know, along with the posting on a complete irrelevant website, a sex change may well be the kind of dramatic and out of the box thinking you need to land your dream job?

Good luck, and please, come back and let us know how you get on?
 
UC, you need to replace yours...
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:p
 
I'm hoping to get into mechanical or design engineering when I go into university. Im currently in As levels (year 12) and my favourite subject I do so far is Mechanics. I love being able to calculate acceleration and free fall.

Plus because of rollercoasters, I have alot of real life examples to practice and revise mechanics.

I know that "designing a rollercoaster" is a bit of a long shot carreer wise, but Im happy to fall back on any engineering job. :)
 
Treeis said:
I'm hoping to get into mechanical or design engineering when I go into university. Im currently in As levels (year 12) and my favourite subject I do so far is Mechanics. I love being able to calculate acceleration and free fall.
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This is pretty much the reason I went into engineering. You find during an engineering degree all the weird maths you learn at A level suddenly makes sense and has a very useful purpose.

UC speaks the truth. I'm only in my second year, so I'm not hugely knowledgeable about the world of work yet. I can definitely vouch for the aspect of being horribly bored by seemingly fascinating/exciting stuff. My summer job dealt with modelling fires and explosions. You find behind the exciting front, you have lots of drawing risk graphs in spreadsheets, writing code to transfer a data file to another type of data file and other such tedious tasks.
 
Here is a screen shot of a job opening from Vekoma. It states the things needed to work in such a area and other helpful things.

DesignengineerVekoma_zps3b0d51ba.jpg
 
I think it's a bit of everything, but mostly mechanical. I'm studying mechanical in hopes of doing that with my life. However, I think there's other types of engineers that ride hardware and the like. Civil engineers, for instance, also work on coasters. I sometimes like to check job postings for other companies (nothing I can do without my degree, just for fun) and saw that S&S was hiring an electrical engineer.
 
I'm studying civil engineering now, and while I don't take the structural mechanics courses, I know enough about them to say that they're really heavy stuff, requiring that you know calculus pretty much to the fingertips. Good luck trying to get such a degree.

However, for those who can make it, and are motivated enough to pull it through, it's one of the best educations you can get, job-wise. Any company that works with engineering - almost no matter the field - need folks who can calculate loads and design components that can withstand them - from household electronics to cargo ships via buildings and structures and cars and... yeah, pretty much everything. A coaster being a very complicated structure, with very interesting dynamic load situations, no wonder why you have to know pretty heavy stuff before you're allowed to design one.

Putting it up once designed, on the other hand, is really nothing special. There might be some special welds here or there, but the entire shebang is delivered like a puzzle from the factory, with extremely detailed assembly instructions, so with the proper tools it's almost routine work. The welds can be a little funny, but building a coaster - as opposed to designing it - is almost routine work for an experienced constructor.
 
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