I’ve heard of this, but now they’ve evidently found video of people riding the infamous loop-the-loop waterslide at “Traction Park”
More on Action Park:
Unbelievable.
I went to Action Park every summer from about agex 7-16. We always walked by the Canonball Loop but it was always closed. The thing was legendary. I’m amazed there is surviving video evidence of it.
Direct YouTube link. The Cannonball Loop starts at around 8:10, but the whole thing is full of great memories.
I still have a scar from the Tarzan Swing. I was trying to impress a girl.
I imagine that and “I saw this on TV one time…” were the two leading causes of injury there. Aside from gross negligence, of course…
When I was told later in life that my back and neck pain was from an earlier injury the only one I could think of happened at Traction Park.
I think lack of any sort of supervision or safety precautions were on the top of the list.
What happens when you go over the Loop? Doesn’t the water stay at the bottom, sending you scraping over a dry slide?
It looks hellacool, I admit, but I have physics-based misgivings.
By Jove I think you got it!
The slide wasn’t open very often and not for long because they couldn’t figure it all out. People kept getting stuck with friction burns. There was a hatch on the top of the slide to get people out who where stuck.
Here is a good over view of the park by one of my favorite magazines.
Holy cats, did I have a great, bloody time at Action Park! I remember losing much skin on the Alpine slide. Boy, I LOOOOVED the Alpine Slide. Oh and almost drowing in the wave pool-- fun time. Once, after it had rained very, very hard, me and my friends got on the bumper boats. Getting off, my girlfriend missed the pier and fell into the muddy water. She disappeared. It was a very scary 5 seconds before she turned up, gasping for air, on the other side of the boat.
Seriously fun times!
I’m with you. As kids we always remember the fun times. But I’d go there at least once a summer and never left without at least a few of scratches on my back. Once I got elbowed by another kid on one of the “rides” and got a big gash under my eye. My friend lost a tooth the same day. But our parents kept on taking us there every year! I would actually cry on rainy days when my parents decided to not go. Who knows, maybe that saved my life.
I did go to Mountain Creek last year, and nothing seemed particularly dangerous to me besides the cliff dive.
I never made it to Action park, we would go to Great Adventure, Keansburg, Long Branch or down to Seaside Heights. When I was little, Asbury Park was still a place to go also.
Me too. We called it Fracture Park, but the Alpine Slide was awesome. You’d get epic friction burns and think it was perfectly normal.
I want to congratulate the mechanical genius who devised the variable speed control on those carts. You could either go hurtling down the chute at terrifying velocity, or you could stop.
But wouldn’t they become un-stuck when the next person crashed into them? :eek: Or were the people spaced long enough to prevent that?
“There’s an obstruction. Send down a couple of kids to dislodge it.”
I never went to Action Park (never even heard of it until an earlier thread) but I did ride a similar alpine slide a couple times in California. You could definitely modulate the speed, depending on how hard you pulled back on the stick.
I didn’t sustain any injuries, either. Maybe I was doing it wrong.
That’s probably because it was some mamby-pamby west coast Alpine Slide with safety protocols and inspections and wussy stuff like that.
Well, it was California…
But the whole thing was so simple. I looked under the cart and it was just wheels, and rubber strips that would rub against the track when you pulled the lever back. What the hell could go wrong with it? I suppose if I just pushed the lever forward and left it there I’d have gone careening out of one of the curves, so I didn’t do that.
I love this line for your link “Two of his family members were also electrocuted, but lived”. Great reporting there.