Beech Bend 13th July 2016

Eleven years ago I made a brief visit to Beech Bend as part of a fun but incredibly stupid detour of almost one thousand miles on a route between Worlds of Fun and Silver Dollar City. At the time the park had just installed a spectacular new wooden coaster that stood out as the only significant attraction among a collection of run-of-the-mill carnival rides, many of them still mounted on trailers.

The park had a fairly difficult season in 2015 with two separate accidents in less than a month. The first occurred on July 25th, when the Jitter Bug swing ride collapsed injuring twelve. On August 16th the Dragon suffered a derailment after two segments of track separated during regular operation, and while nobody was hurt on that occasion the incident still received widespread press coverage. Today it was obvious that changes were happening; quite a few of the older attractions had been repainted, upgraded, or even replaced, presumably to reduce the risk of further incidents, and there was construction underway in the water park.

2016 2006

We began our visit with Spinning Out (#2270), a "three loop" version of the compact spinning coaster from SBF Rides and one of four models to open this year, the others being at Mer de Sable, Tivoli Friheden, and Santa's Village. The upgraded model adds an additional crossover to the usual figure eight, giving the ride a somewhat larger footprint, though it's worth noting that the capacity remains unchanged as both versions run a single four car train. The experience on this unit felt no different to the smaller versions, and given that, it seems unlikely that it will sell in the same quantities, though time will tell.

Our second stop was at Zero-G, an ARM-built drop tower added to the park for the 2012 season in place of the smaller Shock Drop. The car made a very brief pause at the top of no more than a second before being released to fall back to a (mostly) smooth landing at ground level. The ride was decent enough, with an intensity level broadly equivalent to Intamin towers (though several notches below the boosted Fabbri versions).

On my first visit to the park the Haunted House building contained a Pretzel dark ride with rotating cars that had originally operated at nearby Funland Park. The scenery inside had been assembled from a variety of different rides, and it's fair to say that it was both sparse and disjointed, or as Megan would say, hokey. Park management decided to do a major refurbishment for the 2011 season that brought new track, new cars, and some extremely high quality scenes including quite a few animatronics. Better yet, the air conditioning system was as good as ever, making a nice break from the outside heat.

Our next stop was at Wild Mouse. My old trip report described how the cars on the ride were crashing into every single turn in the upper section of the ride with a violent thump, and that was still the case today over a decade later. The second section of the ride felt much better thanks to some superb spinning, and I was right on the verge of saying something nice when we reached he straightening device on the brake run that stopped what had to have been a revolution every two seconds in an instant. The resulting collision was more than strong enough to break things; both of us were thrown to one side, and we could actually see the track in front of us vibrating from the force of the impact. We subsequently watched the same abrupt slam with another car, indicating that there was something very wrong with the underlying hardware.

Our next stop was at the Antique Cars, an Arrow Development installation that opened in 2002. Megan took the driver's seat for our ride and reported oversteer, though as with all attractions of this type there was a guide rail in place to prevent off-road excursions. The vehicles were powered by small lawnmower engines and had a top speed of around five miles per hour. We followed that with a similarly sedate visit to Granny Jones Petting Farm, home to around a dozen friendly goats (on the ground).

The final ride of the morning thus became the one that readers would presumably have expected us to begin with, Kentucky Rumbler. It looked to us like the single Millennium Flyer train had been refurbished in the recent past; the logo plate was gone from the front, and the upholstery was somewhat different to the norm. We decided to go for one ride in the front followed by one in the back, and I can report that the latter was the more comfortable, delivering a remarkably good ride. As we disembarked we noticed a plate on the station platform dedicating the ride to all members of the American Coaster Enthusiasts, a lovely gesture reflecting that club's status as the premiere organisation of its type in the United States.