This year will see the opening of many exciting new rides, including the UK’s tallest and fastest coaster as well as several firsts
By Lance Hart, Screamscape track links track shoes 1
The new year is here, so it’s time to look ahead to the best new roller coasters the 2024 season has in store.
Mack Rides will take the top two spots in 2024 with the creation of its custom layout Stryker Coaster for Europa-Park. This massive coaster will serve as the anchor to the park’s new Croatia-themed land, themed to the electric experiments of Nikola Tesla.
The coaster will feature a dark ride-style show scene near the beginning, several LSM launch tracks boosting the track to speeds of 55.9 mph, a maximum height of 106.6 feet, a unique turntable element and seven inversions along the 4,544-foot long course. Voltron is perhaps the most highly anticipated new coaster in the world for 2024, so I can’t wait to see it in action.
A brand new Mack Rides coaster creation is now under construction at Thorpe Park that will change that park’s skyline forever. The monstrous coaster will stand 236 feet tall, making it the tallest roller coaster in the UK when it opens.
The layout will allow the coaster to reach speeds of 80mph. This means that it will also take the record for the fastest coaster in the UK.
The former Top Thrill Dragster roller coaster at Cedar Point is being re-invented for the 2024 season by Zamperla. The original 420-foot tall top-hat remains, but it has now been joined by 420-foot tall rear spike track and a revised station and launch track layout that will use a new LSM swing-launch system.
The newly themed trains will launch forward at first, rise about halfway up the top-hat before rolling back and getting launched backwards up the reverse spike, only to stall looking straight down at the ground. Falling back to earth and into the launch track again, the trains will be propelled to 120mph to travel up and over the top-hat element to complete the ride course.
After closing down in fall of 2022, Alton Towers has rebuilt its world-famous Nemesis inverted coaster from B&M from the ground up with a completely new track and support system. The ride will feature an all-new color scheme. Some tweaks to the ride’s theme are also expected to be in place by the time this new coaster opens in 2024.
This is a custom layout Dive Machine style roller coaster from B&M, featuring cars that feature three rows of seven-across seating.
Iron Menace will stand 160 feet tall, feature a 95º beyond vertical first drop, four inventions and hit a top speed of 64mph along the 2,169-foot course.
A lot of details about this new Vekoma coaster project are still unknown, other than it will be highly themed and built at a budget of $35 million. It will feature forwards and backwards sections, 12 airtime moments, and the world’s first “inclined turntable”.
This will mark the first arrival of a Vekoma Super Boomerang coaster in North America when it opens in the New Jersey park in 2024.
This is a wild new shuttle coaster concept from Vekoma. The first prototype just opened in China in July 2023 as Cloud Shuttle at Fantawild Wonderland. It should be interesting to see how well it fits in within the Six Flags chain of parks.
This is a former Intamin-built “Accelerator” launched coaster that once ran at Miragica in Italy as Senzafiato. Zamperla purchased the coaster when the park closed, refurbishing and redesigning it to use new trains from Zamperla. The firm has also replaced the entire launch system with a new LSM Launch.
This will be Intamin’s first Hot Racer single-rail coaster design in Europe. It features tire-driven launch sequences that will propel the train throughout a jungle-themed hidden temple-inspired layout at Walibi Rhône-Alpes.
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Built as an expansion to the park’s Super Nintendo World, this will be the first creation of what Universal first filed a patent for as a “Boom Coaster” design.
The coaster will feature individual cars themed as mine-carts and while they will appear to be traveling on a traditional mine-train style track, this is all just an illusion. The real track for the coaster is hidden to the side and will allow the ride to produce the illusion that the carts are able to jump over gaps in the track, as well as perform a number of other unique visual stunts along the way.
We’ve been waiting for this unique coaster to open for a few seasons now. The hope is that this custom motorcycle ride creation from Dynamic Attractions might be ready to finally open to guests at Genting SkyWorlds sometime this year.
The popular Loch Ness Monster coaster that first opened in 1978 is currently undergoing a large-scale track replacement project, with the new track for this classic Arrow coaster being provided by Premier Rides.
While a large bit of track will be replaced, much of the original track and support structure will remain intact, so this isn’t exactly a brand “new” coaster, but the hope is that the restoration will make it ride like a new coaster once again, and continue to thrill guests for future generations.
Look for a brand new Gerstlauer-made Euro-Fighter style steel roller coaster to be added to the park, featuring two inversions along with the classic vertical lift hill and first drop combo that the Euro-Fighter designs are known for.
The original Fire in the Hole coaster first opened at Silver Dollar City way back in 1972, featuring an indoor powered ride through a long mild incline past various scenes, depicting a fire breaking out and spreading through the small town.
The original ride closed forever at the end of 2023, but the park has secretly been building a brand new modern replacement for the past two years, working with Rocky Mountain Construction to re-create this classic attraction with modern technology. The all-new version of the Fire in the Hole dark ride/coaster experience coming in 2024 is a highly anticipated attraction, built with an estimated $30 million budget.
A brand new wooden roller coaster experience is coming to The Great Escape from the Gravity Group. It is a modest-sized coaster, standing only 55.4 feet tall, with a length of only 1,412, making it suitable for the whole family to enjoy.
There is nothing quite like the experience of a legendary classic roller coaster from Anton Schwarzkopf. The Dreier Looping coaster, originally created as a traveling coaster, has made appearances at many parks over the years, traveling the globe from Malaysia (Sunway Park 1997-1999) to the UK (Flamingo Land 2000-2005) and then to Mexico (La Feria Chapultepec Magico 2007-2019).
Now the famous coaster has arrived in America where it has been undergoing refurbishment at Indiana Beach for the past couple of seasons and is now finally expected to open in 2024.
This is a new wooden coaster design from GCI that is expected to open in 2024. It will stand just 86 feet tall and feature a length of 2,590 feet, but otherwise very little is known about the layout or status of the ride itself.
Themed to the popular toy cars from Mattel, the new Mattel Adventure Park opening in Arizona will feature two roller coasters themed to the Hot Wheels brand. The larger of the two will be a Chance Rides Hyper GTX coaster with three inversions named Twin Mill Racer that the guests are really going to enjoy.
Six Flags has purchased an Intamin prototype creation this year for their Georgia theme park.
For basic intents, this appears to be Intamin’s take on a Mack Rides Power Splash design, but it will feature an unusual surf-board style train design, where riders are seated on one of two round carousel-style seating pods that will spin during the launched shuttle-style ride experience.
The SeaWorld Entertainment family of parks have been creating a lot of unique rides with B&M lately and, in this case, we will see a new family launched coaster prototype built at SeaWorld Orlando.
The coaster will start as an indoor ride, taking the place of the park’s former Antarctica-themed dark ride, before launching into an outdoor section of track. At the end, the trains will move back inside and allow guests to exit into the park’s Penguin exhibit.
Bolliger & Mabillard (B&M) is behind this new Family Inverted Coaster creation coming to Busch Gardens in 2024 that will serve as a replacement for the park’s former SandSerpent coaster that was removed in mid-2023.
Underground is a pre-existing coaster at the park that first opened back in 1996 as a unique indoor wooden coaster experience, themed as a trip through a dark mine. Adventureland did not open Underground for the 2023 season and later announced that the attraction would be rebuilt, upgraded and enhanced for the 2024 season.
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This Great Coasters International (GCI) wooden coaster was first built in 2022 but has yet to open. It was first announced as the Bombay Express when it was intended to open as a new attraction for Bollywood Park Dubai, but much has changed since then. Bollywood Park closed for good in early 2023, leaving the brand new coaster still unopened.
Since then, Dubai Parks & Resorts has confirmed their intention to open a Real Madrid World theme park as early as late 2024 by revamping the former Bollywood Park. I would imagine that the coaster will also receive a name change before the park is ready to open possibly in late 2024… or maybe 2025.
This one is a tie and to be honest, I’m not sure if either of these will be ready to open in 2024 due to extensive construction delays for the project. The parts for both coasters have been shipped to the site of the COTAland park, but to my knowledge, neither has started vertical construction.
Palindrome was announced first with an opening in 2022 and then again in 2023, but I believe the park has only just started working on the creation of footers, so maybe 2024 will be the year. Palindrome is a custom layout Gerstlauer Infinity Coaster that will feature a vertical lift hill, a 95º beyond vertical first drop and then pass through 2 inversions before stalling out at the top of a vertical spike track and rolling backwards through the entire course a second time, coming to a stop on a turn-table that will return the cars to the station.
Circuit Breaker is slated to be the first Vekoma TILT coaster built in North America that will feature a layout featuring four inversions, as well as a trench dive or two. We’ll know more about the timetable for Circuit Breaker once the park begins to make progress on Palindrome.
Top image: Hyperia at Thorpe Park
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