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Heide Park Colossos retracking (2019)

Bert2theSpark

Mega Poster
If the structure is fine and Merlin don't want to spend a lot on Heide Park's next investment and not retrack Colossos, I'd say it's likely we'll see the possibility of an RMC conversion, I mean RMC have the 'Compelling Composition' of a Merlin attraction.
 

NeoXIII

Best Newcomer 2016
Nice to know that they were thinking about making it a hybrid, but I imagine not a lot of fans would have liked that. Curious what new stuff they'll add though (unless it's VR).
 

CSLKennyNI

Giga Poster
Yay! Glad I won't miss out on Colossos, was seriously worried for a while there. It's always been a coaster I really wanted to ride. Hopefully with the new track work it should be running better than ever next year, and lessons are learnt from this with regards to maintenance.

In this article they state that the repair work will cost €12 million.
 
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Pokemaniac

Mountain monkey
Staff member
Administrator
Moderator
New track, eh? This makes me even more curious than before. As I stated in a previous post, Colossos was built using glue laminated timber ("glulam" for short). I don't know if that was just the track or the supporting structure as well, but I assume it would be kind of wasteful to use in the support structure as traditional wood evidently does the job just fine (ref. every other wooden coaster out there). If the coaster now needs retracking, it appears to have been the glulam that failed. Glulam is a relatively novel building material, it was only used sparsely until the 1990s or so. Could Colossos' problems be due to faulty glulam application?

It would be really interesting to read the engineering report on this. Guess I'd have to learn German first, though...
 

CrashCoaster

CF Legend
It'd be cool if they also re-profile the airtime hills and the drop, making them steeper and more intense, much like El Toro.

But this is probably one of the best decisions Merlin has made in a LONG time.
 

Pear

Strata Poster
Yay! I was really bummed out about missing it when I went this year and now I have a good reason to go back!
 

DelPiero

Strata Poster
It'd be cool if they also re-profile the airtime hills and the drop, making them steeper and more intense, much like El Toro.

But this is probably one of the best decisions Merlin has made in a LONG time.
Have you ridden both?
 
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