Ready to rocket through the stars on a high speed roller coaster into space? Then you’ve come to the wrong place. Here at Theme Park Tourist, we’re creating a library of Lost Legends, telling the in-depth stories behind beloved-and-lost attractions whose stories are simply too compelling to forget. But that’s only half the story.
Which is why our new Declassified Disaster series is diving into theme park histories that ended quite differently; attractions that crashed and burned. Tired stories, broken technologies, and horrific overlays are behind some of our in-depth features telling the terrifying tales of Disney’s “worst attraction” ever Stitch’s Great Escape, the head-banging Franken-coaster Drachen Fire, the bamboozling Enchanted Tiki Room: Under New Management that reeked of the 1990s, and many more.
But we have no shortage of unforgivable rides, and today we’re telling the tale of a roller coaster so odd, its name actually gave away how bad the experience became. Disaster Transport at Cedar Point was a rare miss at the “Roller Coaster Capital of the World,” creatively abandoned for all to see.
Today, we’ll try to piece together all we know about this Star Tours / Space Mountain rip-off roller coaster that almost instantly degraded into an in-the-dark letdown with practically none of its $4 million special effects left in tact, changing the course of seasonal theme parks forever. What waited inside the mysterious reaches of Disaster Transport’s space race? Let’s start at the beginning…
History along the shores
Image: Cedar Fair
Cedar Point is a park with history. A lot of history. More than 100 years before Walt Disney World would even open, Cedar Point was already a destination. Granted, it looked quite a bit different then than it does today. In fact, in 1870, guests were being ferried to the island not for even the most rudimentary of roller coasters, but for a bathhouse, beer garden, and dance hall amid the cedar forests of the island. The cost for the ferry ride: 25 cents.
Like so many amusement parks around the country today, those humble beginnings lead to a century’s history of highs and lows as gradually and continuously, Cedar Point grew into what we know today: the self-proclaimed Roller Coaster Capital of the World and an annual winner in industry awards.
Image: Cedar Fair
Still, its long, stretched midways dotted with thrill rides betray its origins as a park that’s taken a century to become what it is, from humble roots to a world headquarters for coaster enthusiasts.
One by one, Cedar Point’s roller coasters broke records. 1976’s Corkscrew was the first roller coaster with three inversions, and spanning a midway, to boot! Two years later, Gemini was the first continuous circuit roller coaster ever to cross the 100-foot height barrier, opening as the tallest, fastest, steepest coaster on Earth. And then, there was no stopping it.
Image: Joel Rogers, CoasterGallery.com. All rights reserved; used with permission.
1989. Magnum XL-200. 200-foot full circuit barrier, broken.
2000. Millennium Force. 300-foot full circuit barrier, broken.
2003. Top Thrill Dragster. 400-foot full circuit barrier, broken.
Make no mistake – Cedar Point’s path to becoming “America’s Roller Coaster” featured many stand-out rides that are still thrilling new generations today. One ride you probably don’t hear much about is Avalanche Run. Trust us – this is where it gets interesting.
Avalanche Run
Image: Cedar Fair
In 1985, Cedar Point opened a very unique roller coaster right along its picturesque shores – but Avalanche Run was no run-of-the-mill ride. In fact, the Intamin creation was a most unique configuration called a bobsled roller coaster.
The bobsled coaster debuted at the 1933 – 34 World’s Fair at Riverview Park in Chicago, Illinois, but quickly became a mainstay with dozens of installations during the Golden Age of Roller Coasters. Cedar Point’s Avalanche Run was a modern, steel version (the likes of which had a resurgence in the 1980s and ’90s).
Image: Cedar Fair
On a traditional steel roller coaster, a set of steel rails are gripped above, below, and inside by a set of wheels affixed to each train car. These wheels that “surround” tubular steel track are what allow steel coasters to effortlessly crest airtime hills and pass upside down with ease. On a bobsled coaster, things work a little differently. Rather than being attached to tubular steel rails, the bobsled train simply rides through an open trough, like its namesake winter sport.
These half-tube troughs allow the trains to ride higher or lower around turns, faster or slower through straight-aways, all depending on the configuration and weight of riders.
Image: Joel Rogers, CoasterGallery.com. All rights reserved; used with permission.
Half the thrill of these gravity powered machines is watching the train ahead of you slalom up along a banked turn, wildly swaying right and left as it races down these uncontrolled track elements, literally free!
Avalanche Run may not have been a record breaker like the park would eventually host, but was a fun family coaster and a thrill set along the sandy shores. By far, a majority of the 2:30 ride was spent clicking up its lift hill with barely a minute spent whipping through the convoluted trough, but the 40mph descent was picturesque against the park’s gorgeous Lake Erie beach and sufficiently wild.
Even today, you’ll find a few bobsled coasters scattered around the world (including one of the most ambitious and brilliant – a modern wooden throwback version at Knoebel’s called Flying Turns, painstakingly built to the historic specifications of the older, rarer wooden bobsled coasters, below).
The experience is a wild family coaster that slaloms and slides, banking and turning differently depending on the weight and arrangement of riders. You can get a pretty good idea of the possibilities in the latter half of this point-of-view video from Knoebel’s Flying Turns:
So the runaway fun of a bobsled coaster was a perfect choice for families, and Avalanche Run’s picturesque location on the lakeshore made it a fantastic addition to a growing coaster count at Cedar Point. But Avalanche Run was about to undergo a radical transformation.
Allegedly, the ride’s beautiful lakeside location was its undoing. Insiders say that sand blowing off of the park’s surrounding beaches would be carried inland, accumulating in Avalanche Run’s trough. The patches of residual sediment would close the ride until they could be swept away – a precarious task in and of itself. Just five years after its opening, Avalanche Run was shuttered. But it wouldn’t be removed, re-tracked, or even torn down.
A new CEO had a plan.
Dick Kinzel
In 1986 – the very year after Avalanche Run opened – a new leader came to the helm of Cedar Fair. Dick Kinzel had actually started his career as a Cedar Point team member before working his way into management. He was named the manager of the newly acquired Valleyfair (the other half of Cedar Fair’s name) in 1978 and, less than a decade later, returned to Sandusky as president and CEO of the whole partnership.
Image: Cedar Fair
If we were to fast forward, we’d see that Kinzel would go on to grow Cedar Fair into the international player it is today. It was under Kinzel’s leadership that Cedar Fair acquired Knott’s Berry Farm from the Knott family, purchased and closed the world’s largest theme park, Six Flags Worlds of Adventure (as chronicled in its own in-depth Lost Legends: Geauga Lake feature that’s a must-read for theme park fans), and purchased the Paramount Parks, including nearby Kings Island (home to another set of Lost Legends: Son of Beast and TOMB RAIDER: The Ride).
Meanwhile, Kinzel was super-charging Cedar Point as a thrill-seekers paradise. In fact, Kinzel would grow into the militant general leading the charge into the Coaster Wars that developed in the 1990s and 2000s, and it was his ambition that made Cedar Point the “Roller Coaster Capital of the World.”
Years later, Dick Kinzel’s name would be tied to cost-cutting and a laser-focus on building bigger, taller, faster roller coasters at the expense of nearly everything else. Straddling the company under billions of dollars of debt when the $1.2 billion Paramount Parks purchase landed right alongside the Great Recession of 2008, his final effort as CEO was to try to sell Cedar Fair to a private equity firm that massively undervalued the partnership’s units while securing himself a “Golden Parachute” payout. The move still leaves a sour taste in the mouths of unitholders and industry fans. Like so many CEOs, he might’ve tainted what should’ve been a revered legacy by simply staying on too long and today is remembered in many stories as a penny-pinching villain.
Image: Cedar Fair
His later legacy aside, in the late 1980s Kinzel was a bright new leader with a fresh perspective. Living literally steps from Cedar Point’s front gate, Kinzel naturally played favorites and had limitless ambition for Cedar Point. While few would confuse the thrill-focused amusement park with the decadent themes of Walt Disney World, Kinzel did take special interest in recent Disney projects that he wanted desperately to emulate at his crown jewel park in Ohio: Space Mountain and Star Tours.
While Space Mountain had been a favorite for more than a decade, Star Tours opened at Walt Disney World in 1989. For Disney, the Star Wars motion simulator was an E-Ticket attraction developed intentionally to bring Disney Parks into the modern age – a fascinating story we told in its own in-depth Lost Legends: Star Tours feature. About that time, Kinzel and Company were readying for an interstellar adventure of their own. As luck would have it, they had the perfect canvas on which to paint their out-of-control space escape ride: Avalanche Run. How? That’s the fun part. Read on…
Image: Stuart Newsom, Flickr (license)
If you were to approach Cedar Point’s beachfront in 1990, you’d likely notice something very different about the wide midway that once housed Avalanche Run. It appears that the wild bobsled family coaster has disappeared just five years after its introduction, replaced by a large industrial warehouse. Make no mistake: this big, boxy, tan showbuilding does house a roller coaster, though unless you’re really paying attention, you’d probably not notice that it’s merely Avalanche Run in disguise.
Entering the warehouse, you’d find yourself in a most unusual room, lit entirely by blacklight. The trippy room is filled with glowing travel posters, advertising exotic destinations around the world like Paris and Rome. The vibe? Unclear. Even in the ride’s earliest days when a vaguely-Star-Wars-ian Droid stood at the head of the room quipping about interstellar travel.
From this unusual room, guests would pass windows looking into a stocked warehouse of wooden crates and into a steel tunnel painted black with phosphorescent, glowing handprints all around. With a pair of ChromaDepth glasses, the blue handprints would appear to recede away with the red handprints appearing to float in the foreground. The trippy, classic dark ride effect might’ve been dated by the ride’s 1990 debut, but it had a certain retro-cool.
And the blacklight motif continutes into the main queue room: the Repair Bay.
Image: Cedar Fair
Another blacklight room, this Repair Bay centered around an oscillating tube of light, its undulating sound signaling its powering up over and over, with generators and science center style plasma globes meant to invoke a futuristic feel.
Indeed, this large queue room had some odd features, like blacklight “security cameras” and an unusual (and unintentionally humorous) sign that would like up with the word “REJECT” randomly as guests passed underneath, as if they’d been scanned. Garage doors along the room’s edge were mostly closed except Dock 1, wherein one of the ride’s sleds was being “repaired” by pneumatic articulating arms seeming to solder the train through flashing lights.
Image: Cedar Fair
Most familiar to fans of Walt Disney World’s Star Tours, this queue room also featured overhead wire baskets carrying luggage along a slowly-moving track.
Rounding the corner, guests would pass by the apparant logo of this interstellar travel agency: Dispatch Master Transport. Get it? In any case, it was just a quick climb up a set of stairs and to the ride’s blacklight loading dock Launch Area, where a glowing team member would usher you onto a rocket waiting just for you.
Image: Cedar Fair
Your vessel to the stars is a repurposed bobsled from the former Avalanche Run, identical to the one you watched in the Repair Bay. Maybe this is the rocket from the Repair Bay. It’s seen better days. But maybe that’s the point.
You might notice that, unlike most roller coaster trains, this isn’t a “train” so much as it’s a “car.” There’s no articulating joints between seats. The solid rocket features five rows, each holding two guests. With only 10 guests per train, Disaster Transport has a relatively low hourly capacity. While it might be enough for a family ride like Avalanche Run, people seem inexplicably drawn toward “mysterious” rides that they can’t see, and that leaves Disaster Transport’s queue filled.
Image: Cedar Fair
In any case, once on board the train slowly departs from the station and enters what very well may be one of the most grating lift hills on record. For more than a minute, the rocket clanks up the hill that feels more or less horizontal. In an unintentionally hilarious twist, the red and blue chaser lights lining the walls of the seemingly endless lift hill flash advancing up the hill and not down, thereby making your ascent seem even less significant. If this hill is meant to capture the same feeling of ascent as Disneyland’s Space Mountain, it woefully misses the mark. If it’s supposed to capture the retro awe of Magic Kingdom’s, it’s way off base.
In any case, the echoing click of the ride’s anti-rollbacks underscores the unbelievable lift hill. (Seriously… in the video below, we’ll challenge you to watch the whole thing without skipping ahead.)
Even if the lift hill doesn’t get across the idea of a launch, in the ride’s earliest days the lift hill would terminate in an endless star field projected inside the showbuilding overhead. (While this effect lasted longer than the rest, it was long gone by time the ride’s closure was announced.) With this brief, fleeting glimpse of stars projected ahead, the train would crest the lift hill and begin its descent. Finally entering into the bobsled tube, the coaster would zig and zag before passing through a large helix.
In the darkness, the wreckage of a space ship could be seen floating dead ahead, and as the coaster passes over a block brake, it dives to the left under the debris, entering the ride’s main showbuilding. Suddenly, glowing planets come into view and, in the center of the room, a large spaceship hovers like something from a Buck Rogers comic, glowing from the light of the planets and fiber optics sparks. The train spiral upwards around the perimeter of the room, viewing the spaceship from all sides.
Then, it re-enters the dark tubes that connect the ride’s showbuildings and twists away, with fiber optic stars overhead and quick flashes of strobes as the only chance to clearly make out the bobsled configuration that was once the ride’s hallmark.
After twisting left and right, the coaster would zoom into a final show scene – a small set of a Martian landscape compete with moon craters, jagged rocks, and a glowing, otherworldly sunset projected on a rear set. One final turn would bring the train to its final brake run, glowing under intense UV light with phosphorescent scientific keypads all around.
At first, you might be bamboozled that the experience is already over. By any count, the lift hill took quantifiably longer than the ride itself. Still, your rocket arrives at the unload station and you disembark. After exiting down a set of steps, you find yourself back outside the showbuilding where a peculiar sign closes the loose narrative of the jumbled ride:
“Welcome to Alaska.”
You might have to re-read it to be sure, but yes. You’re now in Alaska. Indeed, in one of the final touches of storytelling the ride offers, you’ll notice that the flowerbeds are filled with white stones standing-in for snow.
Why Alaska? At the height of the ride’s theming, a much clearer narrative (told throughout a true, Animatronic-led pre-show and even on the ride) told us that we were customers of interstellar travel company Dispatch Master Transport, which offered shuttles to Paris, Rome, Tokyo, and other international destinations. Starfields, projected explosions, and laser-blasting alien shuttles cut your voyage short short and turned your leisurely ride into a rescue mission. (And we wonder – was that last scene on the ride with Martian rocks meant to be our touchdown in Alaska?)
Original advertisements from the ride’s opening year may give an inkling at what the ride was supposed to offer:
Image: Cedar Fair
By the 21st century, any indication of a plot was gone, as were the special effects, projections, starfields, lasers, audio cues, and more. To ride Disaster Transport after the new millennium would leave you stunned… and in this case, that’s not a compliment. Space pirates? Laser blasting aliens? Asteroids? If they were there, we must’ve blinked and missed them.
No matter. If anything, you might’ve thought Disaster Transport was humorous, with self-serious presentation and its dated effects (obviously half-flickered-out) as a light-hearted throwback to the 1970s (nevermind that the ride opened in 1990)!
What wasn’t so funny was that some guests queued for an hour or more for the 50 second descent…
Image: Joel Rogers, CoasterGallery.com. All rights reserved; used with permission.
To be clear, Disaster Transport lived up to its name – it was a disaster. What remained of the ride’s “theming” by the 21st century was laughable, and there appeared to be absolutely no attempt to do so much as replace a lightbulb. As cobwebs gathered and the ride’s pre-show, music, lighting, and props disappeared one-by-one, Cedar Point inherited a laughing-stock ride that categorically failed at everything it had set out to do.
It would be one thing if Disaster Transport were a one-off miss. Instead, the ride’s outright failure signaled a changed in Cedar Fair that would last for decades. Wait until you see the domino effect set off by Disaster Transport… Read on…
It may very well be that Disaster Transport was doomed from the start. In its early days, the ride probably did hold its own as a seasonal park’s budget-friendly version of Space Mountain with Star Tours thrown in for good measure. The $4 million Dick Kinzel and company had spent turning the $3 million ride into a space epic had created a unique if oversold family attraction of Avalanche Run.
The problem is, year after year after year, more and more of the ride’s once at-least-noteworthy special effects, lighting elements, and props fell into disrepair, eventually disappearing altogether. The pre-show was axed after only a few years.
Then, any semblance of a storyline (thin as it might’ve been anyway) disappeared when the better part of the queue was repurposed as a haunted house for the park’s annual Halloweekends event around the new millennium, with guests rerouted through a new entrance into what was the final queue room – the Repair Bay.
Even then, entering guests would pass by a mobile cart hocking light-up spinners and glow sticks typically reserved for fireworks shows. For a time under Dick Kinzel’s infamous penny-pinching regime, the park even had the gall to sell paper “3D glasses” in the queue for $1.00 a pop – an absolute and astounding offense to fans’ sensibilities.
Lost Legacy
By the 21st century, Disaster Transport was living up to its name. The ride took place mostly in the dark – an agonizing 70-second ascent up what must’ve felt like the slowest, dustiest, most retro lift hill in the park, followed by a 50 second meandering descent with practically nothing to see, and certainly nothing worth seeing. Disaster Transport’s biggest selling point in the 21st century was probably its air conditioning… when it worked.
While the state of Disaster Transport was truly a blemish on Cedar Point’s otherwise storied coaster collection, the ride’s legacy was even more damaging. Unfortunately, Dick Kinzel and company had been burned by Disaster Transport and seemed to have learned a self-imposed lesson: they apparently vowed that theming would never again trump thrills. The cost and upkeep required for even simple special effects, fog, theatrical lighting, and simple animatronics had been too much for the thrill park to commit to, and the half-baked ride left behind was an embarassment.
You’ll see this painful reminder today in the fact that Cedar Point – often regarded as one of the “best parks in the world” today – has zero dark rides. None. It’s strange to consider that this industry-leading park has no opportunities to get out of the sun unless you step into a restaurant or a show. Sure, a thrill park is a thrill park. But Cedar Point has no dark rides, no indoor, themed coasters, nothing. Instead, it’s one giant roller coaster after another after another dotted down the midway.
Elsewhere
Image: Cedar Fair / Viacom
The thing is, stories, thoughtful themes, and dark ride elements do have a place, even in thrill parks! Just a few hours southwest, Paramount’s Kings Island did things differently… The Cincinnati park’s ride lineup included some impressive rides blending storytelling and thrills.
The Italian Job: Stunt Track, a relatively simple but effective family launched coaster through the 2005 film’s big finale in ¾ scale MINI Coopers. The ride’s explosive circuit included all the dressings of a movie set and some phenomenal special effects throughout.
Top Gun: The Jet Coaster was a simple application of theme overtop a family suspended, swinging coaster, complete with a “aircraft carrier” station, billowing fog, and a famous soundtrack.
Image: Viacom / CBS / Paramount Parks
The Outer Limits: Flight of Fear, housed in a government facility’s Bureau of Paranormal Research hangar, was a crown jewel. Guests would enter the facility’s press hangar to see the incredible new findings of the government first-hand: a landed alien saucer. Stepping inside, guests would be abducted into a Twilight Zone style storyline, launched into one of the world’s most twisted, convoluted, impressive roller coasters.
Scooby-Doo and the Haunted Castle was a Sally family dark ride through a blacklight game of ghost-tag.
Adventure Express sent guests along one of the most impressive family mine train routes in the world, through caves, ancient temples, tombs, and bamboo groves with mist, water, crawling vines, animatronics, and more.
And the king of them all, Kings Island’s TOMB RAIDER: The Ride was arguably one of the best themed rides to ever exist, and certainly one of the most impressive outside of California and Florida. The mysterious ride was so unique, riders often didn’t know kind of ride it was even once they were seated on-board. So intriguing was this one-of-a-kind experience, we chronicled it in its own in-depth Lost Legends – Tomb Raider: The Ride feature.
At Kings Island and its fellow Paramount Parks, impressive thrills coexisted within themed lands, with even a touch of cinematic storytelling and a commitment to detail and special effects raising the parks in renown. It was a skillful blending that Cedar Fair had attempted once – and only once. Maybe it was alright, though! After all, Cedar Fair parks could stay firmly in the thrill-amusement park market with Paramount’s aimed somewhere else entirely – family theme parks.
Why go into detail about the difference Paramount’s details made?
In 2006 Cedar Fair actually acquired Paramount Parks, including Kings Island. The whole set of Paramount Parks had skillfully blended theme and thrills in many spots, but the loss of Paramount’s licensing required of Cedar Fair that it eliminate overt movie references and reimagine some of the theatrical theming scattered around the parks. Cedar Fair would need to re-theme some of Paramount’s attractions, and that meant finally facing their fear of storytelling and special effects head on… Didn’t it?
Image: Jeremy Thompson, Flickr
The Italian Job Stunt Track was renamed Backlot Stunt Coaster (its once-detailed ¾ scale MINI Coopers stripped to vaguely car-shaped blobs, above, also losing its splashdown, fire effects, and on-board audio); FACE/OFF was rebranded the less-inspired Invertigo; Scooby Doo and the Haunted Castle dark rides across the Paramount Parks chain became the groan-worthy, generic Boo Blasters on Boo Hill (…that’s the best someone could come up with?); and Top Gun: The Jet Coaster became Flight Deck – seemingly the most generic aviation-themed name the company could trademark.
It was as if Cedar Fair set out to select the most generic versions of the rides’ previous name rather than inventing new stories of their own, inherently dooming Paramount’s rides to forever be referred to by their former identities. (Who, after all, would concede to calling the drop tower Drop Tower when Paramount’s Drop Zone: Stunt Tower was so much more clever?) Most painfully, that world-class, Disney-esque TOMB RAIDER: The Ride became an abysmal ride called The Crypt as detailed in the must-read in-depth story behind one of the best themed rides ever, Lost Legends – TOMB RAIDER: The Ride.
(Kinzel’s Cedar Fair treated Six Flags Worlds of Adventure with as much reverence when they purchased the world’s largest theme park and closed it forever without warning – the debilitating tale of Geauga Lake, one of the most popular stories we’ve ever told here.)
Industry experts allege that at every step of the way, Kinzel was informed (subconsciously, perhaps) by the failure of Disaster Transport and its dismal descent into disrepair. The millions spent changing Avalanche Run had changed him, too, and Cedar Fair would avoid theming at all costs. That’s why Paramount Parks were de-themed rather than re-themed, and why the future of the former Paramount Parks looked bleak for a time as locals wrestled with disappearing details, forgotten dark rides, and…. well… rides called Flight Deck and Drop Tower.
Theming today
The silver lining might be that Dick Kinzel left Cedar Fair in 2012 after that failed sell-out we mentioned earlier, passing the company on to Matt Ouimet, a former president of the Disneyland Resort. Ouimet has an impressive résumé of his own – he’s the one who took charge of Disneyland after Michael Eisner’s (eerily similar) penny-pinching era and frosty departure at Disney, with Ouimet leading the charge to bring Disneyland back to life.
Image: Cedar Fair
Under Ouimet, the company has seen a turnaround in its attention to detail. The historic (pre-Cedar Fair) dark rides at Knott’s Berry Farm were fantastically freshened while a new slew of dark rides have migrated into Cedar Fair’s parks under an ongoing initiative. Ouimet, it seems, recognized the importance of themed rides and lands (chalk that up to his Disneyland past) and has actually set out to make sure that, even in parks primarily and unapologetically dedicated to thrills, details (re)appear.
Each park has been given license to celebrate its own history and story and atmosphere rather than carbon-copying names and identities and themes across parks, all while elements of Paramount’s leftover theming have been restored. As themed lands and legacy names are restored across the chain, new dark rides, seasonal celebrations, shows, and flat rides prove that in the new Cedar Fair, we’re likely to see more than just giant roller coasters opening every summer.
Image: Joel Rogers, CoasterGallery.com. All rights reserved; used with permission.
When new coasters do arrive, they’re placed in themed lands that make sense with light theming, like Banshee’s foggy Irish moors cemetery queue (complete with a towering tombstone and eternal flame for Son of Beast) and the ride’s Irish chapel station, with the coaster exiting out of a broken stained glass window.
To be clear, Cedar Fair’s parks are still thrill parks and are likely to stay that way, but Ouimet oversaw the infusion of character and elements of storytelling back into the company’s lineup. Little touches like that elevate Cedar Fair’s parks back toward the healthy balance Paramount had struck.
One thing ride that wasn’t given a rebirth of theming: Disaster Transport.
Disaster Demolition
Image: Cedar Fair
To review, Disaster Transport opened in 1985 and lost its luster in Cedar Point’s ride lineup pretty quickly. It was overshadowed by the debut of Magnum XL-200 the year before which set the park on its thrill-focused course.
Meanwhile, guests quickly discovered that building a box around Avalanche Run didn’t do much to improve its short and shallow experience. At best, the darkness removed some of the thrill of the bobsled coaster and its unique setup. At worst, concealing the mild attraction indoors made later generations of guests overestimate its appeal, leading to long queues for a relative letdown.
Disaster Transport took its final riders into the darkness of outer space on July 29, 2012. The coaster and its next-door neighbor – the sightseeing Space Spiral tower – were soon to fall to the sand.
Ouimet’s long-term plans for Cedar Point focused on leveraging the park’s most underutilized asset: its beach. The island-turned-peninsula park is literally surrounded by Lake Erie, with sand beaches and marinas dotting Cedar Point’s perimeter. Rides like Millennium Force, Maverick, and Magnum XL-200 play out along the picturesque shores, often ranking high on annual lists with their views cited as a leading reason.
But the park’s northeastern shore particularly was much less picturesque, if only because the industrial tan warehouse of Disaster Transport blocked it from view, dominating an entire tucked-away midway. It was this beach that Ouimet had eyed as a future growth area, and Disaster Transport was in the way.
Image: Cedar Fair
Don’t misunderstand: despite its shortcomings and the disastrous story behind it, an entire generation of Cedar Point’s followers grew up with Disaster Transport, likely citing it as one of their first “grown up” roller coasters! For those who knew and loved the ride, we understand. The demolition of Disaster Transport likely did tug at the heartstrings of children of the ‘80s and ‘90s, who would miss its retro-appeal. It also worried enthusiasts that the mid-sized family ride might make way for yet another high speed thrill, narrowing Cedar Point’s family offerings even further.
The reality wasn’t nearly that bad. Cedar Point had radical plans for Disaster Transport’s property that would transform the park’s entire front half.
Gatekeeper
Image: Martin Lewison, Flickr (license)
In 2013, the towering tan showbuilding was no more. Instead, the lakeside midway became an open plaza with stellar views of the water, with winged shades covering a beachfront queue. A new roller coaster – royal blue, white, and gold – rose from the sand. Gatekeeper is an elegant, soaring, swooping B&M Wing Rider that rises high above the park’s skyline, gracefully gliding above the beach.
Riders are seated aboard “winged” trains suspending them with no track above or below – an unexperience unlike any other at Cedar Point.
Image: Cedar Fair
With its station and lift hill rising in the area once blocked by a corrugated steel warehouse, Gatekeeper filled Disaster Transport’s spot in more ways than one. Despite its awesome size and statistics, the soaring, swooping, elegant, oversized ride is a perfect family attraction – massive, but gentle and smooth.
More than just a massive thrill ride investment, Gatekeeper opened up Cedar Point’s beach and redefined the front half of the park. The blazing blue track and soaring golden trains dominate the skyline and – true to the ride’s name – signal your entry to the Roller Coaster Capital of the World
And that’s probably one of the ride’s most stellar features: to accomodate Gatekeeper, the park’s entrance was reconfigured, and designers took the opportunity to give the experience of arriving a true rebirth. The entry gates were restylized in retro-modern textures and typefaces with master-planned gardens and signage. From the entry gates rise two impeccable white towers, each with a cutout “keyhole” perfectly aligned for Gatekeeper’s track.
As the train approaches the park’s gates, it leaps skyward and races toward the white towers, twisting at the last second to pass through the carved keyholes with an elegance that makes passers-by stop and stare. For riders, too, the illusion of an impending collision is a signature experience.
Image: Cedar Fair
Whatever your thoughts on Gatekeeper, we can be sure that it is a fitting replacement for Disaster Transport and a wonderful ride to transition Cedar Point from its Coaster Wars heyday into the modern, built-out family park that’s it transforming into.
Disaster
There’s no question that Disaster Transport ended up living up to its name. The unfortunate roller coaster started its life as a fun family coaster and ended as a letdown without ever changing a single square foot of track. All it took was an overbaked attempt at theming and then a total and complete abandonment of it to spoil a unique ride and darken Cedar Fair’s attitude toward theming for a generation.
Image: Cedar Fair
The truth is, Disaster Transport will likely always be remembered as a major (and rare) miss for the Roller Coaster Capital of the World, though it no doubt holds a special place in the hearts of children of the ’80s and ’90s for whom it might’ve been their first “grown-up” coaster. If only Cedar Point could’ve committed to the ride’s special effects and themes, they might’ve indeed ended up with their own Space Mountain. Instead, Disaster Transport was a mess destined for inclusion in our Disaster Files series.
We leave you with a final retrospective lights-on look at the interior of Disaster Transport’s main showbuilding.
If you enjoyed our detailed look at this unintentional flub, make the jump to our LEGEND LIBRARY to dig into another Disaster File, or pick up with another full feature!
Now we have to know: did you ever get a chance to ride Avalanche Run or Disaster Transport? What were your thoughts about the confusing ride? Did Cedar Point’s seasonal take on Space Mountain ever stand a chance, or was the half-baked low-budget concept doomed to be lost among the stars? Record your memories and thoughts in the comments below to keep this bumbling ride alive for another generation!
