Branson, Mo. — I believe I’ve discovered the secret to time travel: magnets.
No, I haven’t unlocked the time-space continuum. But I have concluded that magnets play a key role in the operation of Time Traveler, Silver Dollar City’s impressive new roller coaster. The Branson, Mo., theme park has a real winner with its $26-million ride. But it also has something of an image problem with the coaster—a problem that I aim to help dispel.
Silver Dollar City is pitching its new attraction as breaking a number of world records. It rightfully claims that Time Traveler is the fastest, steepest, and tallest complete-circuit spinning roller coaster. It also boasts that it is the only one to include three inversions as well as two launches. All of the assertions are true, and the combination of features and elements helps make Time Traveler a unique, wild, and wonderful ride.
The problem? When folks hear “spinning roller coaster,” they might think of a madly gyrating ride vehicle—and the potential motion sickness it could cause. Cast away those thoughts. I’m here to tell you that while Time Traveler’s cars do rotate, they are not like a washing machine’s spin cycle. They aren’t even like the slow-tumbling gentle cycle in your dryer. That’s because Silver Dollar City and Mack Rides, the German company that manufactured the coaster, have figured out a clever way to control the rotation speed. Their secret? Magnets.
Too much spinning? Give me a brake.
Each coaster car is mounted on a round fin that allows it to freely spin. But each of the cars also has a small onboard magnet that can be adjusted to brake the turning. Moving the magnets closer to the fins increases the magnetic force and slows the spinning.
I rode Time Traveler several times in March on the second day it had opened to the public. Silver Dollar City had set the cars’ magnetic fields at 25% of their capacity. At that setting, I don’t think any of the cars I was in ever made more than three compete revolutions over the course of the entire two-minute ride. While variables such as passenger load can have an impact (an imbalanced car with two heavy adults on one side and two small children on the other, for example, could cause it to spin more), I never observed any gyrating cars, madly or otherwise.
“It’s not about spinning a lot,” says Franz Friedl, the head of installation for Mack Rides. “The idea is really that the spinning gives you a different experience every time you ride.”
Indeed, even when I was in the same seat on the same car, I found myself in different positions at the same points during successive rides. The cars might rotate a few degrees in one direction, but then reverse direction after navigating one of the coaster’s elements. It was quite a hoot to soar up into an inversion facing skyward and see an adjacent car slowly turn to reveal its passengers staring down at me as they expressed both elation and terror.
You'll be positively attracted to this coaster
But not that much terror. At a height of 100 feet and a top speed of 50 mph, Time Traveler is plenty thrilling, but it’s not in the same league as some of the more extreme non-spinning coasters out there. Brad Thomas, the park’s president, calls it a “thrill ride that appeals to families,” which sounds about right. The height limit for the ride is 51 inches.
Each of Time Traveler’s cars seats four passengers, with two facing forward and two facing backward. As the train leaves the station, the cars rotate about a half spin so that the rear-facing passengers end up facing forwards and vice versa. And how does the ride accomplish that? You guessed it: magnets. The round fins on the cars pass through a magnet mounted to the track that causes them to spin.
Immediately after leaving the station the train plummets 100 feet at 90 degrees (as in straight down). To partially quell the speed (and help make the ride more family-friendly), trim brakes in the track powered by—yup— magnets imperceptibly slow the train’s first drop. After the drop, the ride takes off for a delightful, spinning romp through the Ozarks holler. Along the way, time travelers flip head over heels as they encounter a 95-foot-tall loop, a “zero-G roll” (a barrel roll-like maneuver that lifts them slightly out of their seats as it inverts them), and a dive loop.
About halfway through the ride, the train momentarily comes to a stop until linear synchronous motors launch it from 0 to 47 mph in 3 seconds. And what, you might ask, are linear synchronous motors? It is a fancy name for magnetic motors (yes, magnets yet again) embedded in the track that attract and repel magnets attached to the train to quickly rev it up to speed. A second pass-through a magnetic launch near the end of the ride boosts the speed from 30 to 45 mph in 3.5 seconds. That gives the train enough oomph to proceed up and back into the loading station.
Through it all, the coaster is wonderfully smooth. The launches are exhilarating. There are a couple of brief airtime, or free-floating, moments, especially in the train’s back car. Overall, the last car provides a more forceful and giddy ride experience. And the mild spinning really distinguishes Time Traveler from other coasters.
A tempest in a teacup
The spinning wasn’t always mild. When Silver Dollar City decided it was going to buy Mack Rides’ unique take on a spinning coaster, park officials went to Germany to try a prototype car that the manufacturer installed on an existing coaster. “It was not a pleasant experience,” says Thomas about the intense whirling and spiraling he and his team endured. “It was like a [rapidly spinning] teacup ride on a coaster. It would not have worked here.” In response, Mack’s engineers developed the breakthrough magnetic control system to temper the rotation speed.
While they weren’t initially thrilled about the uninhibited spinning, the Silver Dollar City folks were taken by the car that Mack designed for the coaster. Thomas says they thought it looked like some kind of time contraption. From that spark came the Time Traveler name and theme.
The park developed a rich storyline about a late 19th-century clockmaker and tinkerer who develops a time machine. To get to the ride, visitors pass through the inventor’s workshop, which is adorned, steampunk-style, with timepieces, cogs, gears, and mysterious artifacts about time travel.
With their copper, gold, and bronze embellishments, the coaster’s stunning cars make a bold statement. They look like something H. G. Wells may have described or Leonardo da Vinci may have built. Each one includes stylish time mechanisms affixed to its front and back that are set to July 1886. They are emblematic of Time Traveler, a ride that uses sophisticated, modern-day magnetic technology to transport riders back in time. At least, that’s my spin on the marvelous coaster.
