Ride Profile
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THE STORY OF
Alton Towers’ new record- breaking rollercoaster is now open. The Smiler, by Gerstlauer, packs 14 inversions into a tight footprint and, at a total cost of £18 million ($27m/€21m), is the British park’s most expensive attraction to date. Ben Dowson, creative lead of resort theme parks for parent company Merlin
Entertainments (pictured), shares The Smiler story with Park World readers
Why Alton Towers’ new coaster is more sinister than it looks
THE SMILER W
e knew that 2013 was going to be a big investment year for Alton Towers, as it had been quite a few years since we had done a really big thrill coaster – or “Secret Weapon” (SW) as we call them during development. The last Secret Weapon, Thirteen (SW6), was aimed more at the family market, so the time was right for a 1.4-metre height limit white-knuckle experience.
It was then a case of looking at various compelling propositions; some sort of world’s first element to capture the imagination of the general public. We came up with several concepts, and one that we thought we could achieve was the record for the amount of inversions.
When we started the project, the current rollercoaster inversion record stood at 10 with Colossus at Thorpe Park and one in China [Chimelong Paradise] but there were also rumours of a park in the Far East [Jinling Happy World in China] building an 11 loop ride, and we were conscious that we didn’t just want to beat the record, we wanted to smash it, to really give ourselves a bit of a safeguard. I think the initial brief to Gerstlauer was “12 or more” and they came back with 14!”
We approached a number of manufacturers, but Merlin already had a good working relationship with Gerstlauer with after doing SAW: The Ride at Thorpe, and we knew that their EuroFighter product offered a really great, thrilling experience that would lend itself well to the site we had available at Alton Towers. It’s an incredibly compact site, and we’ve since had a smile about the fact that The Smiler is Alton’s biggest and longest rollercoaster (1.1km), with one of the smallest footprints in the park. That presented a challenge right the start, but Gerstlauer designed a layout that really squeezed the most out of it, and having a lot of inversions certainly helps us get more track into the area. Alton Towers is notorious for planning issues; as a heritage site we are not allowed to go above the tree line with any of the rides, so we tend to dig down. As the ride got designed and we calculated the forces needed to get the train around the track, we realised that we needed to go deeper. There was a significant amount of excavation on this project, more than I think any of us first envisaged, however it wasn’t too difficult to get planning approved because there had been a
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JULY 2013
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