Ride Profile
the limited space available necessitating a custom layout, new coaster Wood Express combines a beautifully smooth ride with family- friendly thrills. Park World reports In the town of Saint Paul near Rouen in northern France, amusement park Parc Saint Paul entertains guests throughout the year with a range of family-friendly attractions and live animal shows.
A ride to remember All the existing coasters at Parc Saint Paul are steel, so a wooden coaster was a new direction for the French park. Gilles Campion, the owner of Parc Saint Paul, explains: “To create a new unique experience for our guests, the wood coaster was the best choice. It allows us to give a different sensation to riders, as the wood coaster keeps a constant speed for the length of the ride.”
All aboard! P
arc Saint Paul’s newest coaster, a woodie by The Gravity Group, takes the French amusement park in a new direction. With
The ride experience sets visitors on course for a vigorous combination of speed, acceleration and airtime. A double out and back roller coaster, Wood Express exits the station, makes a tight turn, and starts its climb, before launching into a course that takes in thirteen airtime locations spread across a mix of double-down hills, bunny-hills, and some larger camel-back hills. Between the airtime, twists and turns have riders banked close to 70 degrees as they scream around the track. The train enters the end of the ride at a fair speed, so magnetic brakes at the end of the ride ensure a strong, but still smooth stop.
Calling in the specialists With its custom layout, choosing the final layout for Wood Express took longer than usual. “The main objective was to use as much as possible of the available area. As it was a long but quite stretched out area, a typical ‘out and back’ was the best solution. The addition of some cross-over sections in the curve have created two or three beautiful ‘head-chopper’ moments!” says Campion. Korey T. Kiepert is engineer and principal at wooden roller coaster specialist The Gravity Group, the manufacturer of Wood Express. We asked him what made the experience of working on Wood Express stand out for him. “Typically, every wooden roller coaster that we build is unique,” he explains. “Very rarely are we able to take a design from one park and use it in another location. For Wood Express, we were given a long and slender plot of land. The ground was not flat, so we aimed to use the slope of the land to our advantage to make drops larger and add to the ride experience.” “The Gravity Group creates some of the biggest wooden
coasters in the world, but they are also able to create coasters adapted to regional amusements parks, with just 300-400,000 vistors per year,” says Campion.
AUGUST 2018 41 Express Figures
Height: 15.24 metres First Drop: 14.8844 Length: 483.9767 Airtime Locations: 13 Maximum Banking: 69 degrees Top speed: 61.42866
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