Roller Coaster Tapestries
Description: Viper was a steel roller coaster located in a Houston, Texas theme park. Manufactured by Anton Schwarzkopf, the Looping Star model opened in 1989 and had two trains with seven cars per train and riders arranged two across for a total of 28 riders per train. The track featured a single inversion, ran a length of 1,942.3 ft, had a peak height of 80.4 ft, and a top speed of 47.8 mph. Viper was demolished with the closing of the park on October 30, 2005. It had previously operated at a park in St. Louis, where it was known as Jet Scream from 1981 to 1988. An identical installation still operates at in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Its paint scheme is different, and the tunnel surrounds the final turn as opposed to the drop hill.
Description: The first roller coasters utilized wooden track, which consists of running rails made of flat steel strips mounted to laminated wood. Wooden coaster construction became stagnant in the '70s due to the rising popularity of steel roller coaster design, but a few new builds bucked the trend to keep the Golden Age of roller coasters alive. One such example is 'The Beast,' built in 1979 in Mason, Ohio. This was the tallest, fastest, and longest wooden roller coaster in the world at the time of it's opening. Decades later, it is still the longest, spanning 7,361 feet, racing across 35 acres of hilly, wooded terrain. Two lift hills contribute to the ride's duration of more than four minutes, which also ranks as one of the world's longest runtimes.
