What Cheer, Netop?

We spent the past week in Denmark, split between a couple of days in Aarhus (the biggest city in Jutland, the European mainland part) and a few in Copenhagen. Honestly, one of the main reasons I even suggested going to Denmark was to experience Copenhagen's world-famous urban amusement park, Tivoli Gardens, and its amazing bucket-list coaster Rutschebanen, a side-friction coaster built in 1914.

We'd had a stretch goal of also visiting Aarhus's amusement park Tivoli Friheden on the afternoon of our arrival there, but between bad weather and exhaustion that did not happen. We did spend the following sunny day at Aarhus's amazing historical reconstruction park Den Gamle By. That reminded me a bit of Colonial Williamsburg, but with a broader sweep, with restored buildings ranging from the 16th century to the 21st (there's a surprisingly big section of early-1970s streets, businesses and apartments, including a hippie commune and an electronics shop full of glorious analog hi-fi equipment, and a little section recreating for posterity a street from the 2010s with a dying Blockbuster Video). There are also several historical museums within the park. Highly, highly recommended.

The weather in a Danish autumn is at least as mercurial as in New England and you just have to work around it. We went to indoor attractions (mostly art museums) on the rainy days and hit Copenhagen's Tivoli on a relatively good one, which started out sunny with a little drizzle later. It was the beginning of Tivoli's Halloween event, so they were open late, but the weather got worse as the afternoon went on and we were getting tired, so we didn't stay super late. We're not big on Halloween haunts (I think they converted the funhouse to one; I'd like to hit it during the summer season) but the pumpkiny decor everywhere was beautiful.

I went directly to Rutschebanen and found it not yet operating, though there were workers milling about on the ride so that was a promising sign. Given that we didn't hit Tivoli Friheden, there was an opportunity for Rutschebanen to be my 40th cred, but, eh, that kind of numerological pickiness doesn't rule me. Instead, we decided to hit some rides that both of us could enjoy: the 70-year-old cast-iron Ferris wheel, the gorgeous, colorful bumper cars (which have a long, chaotic cycle), and my actual 40th cred, the powered Mack family coaster Mælkevejen (here is Amuseaholics' POV):



This is a fairly new ride that packs more force than you'd expect. It's a long ride, since they give you THREE laps around the course, and the layout is long enough that at an American park they probably would have probably gotten away with one lap. There is whimsical space-rocket theming about a transit service circling the Milky Way. It's a bunch of turns and helixes, all elevated enough that you get nice views of the park and the surrounding neighborhood, but we both got off a little dizzy.

Rutschebanen was still down so we went on the ride underneath it, an adorable dark boat ride called Minen (here's Attractions Magazine's ride-through):



This has a Ghost Hunt-style target-shooting element that I think was added after the fact, but it's not scored and isn't really the main focus of the ride. It's all about the cute funny-animal animatronics. We got multiple rides on this one.

I was steeling myself for Rutschebanen to never get running (this kind of disappointment is part of being a coaster fan), but, nah, they got this eleventy-one-year-old classic going before too long and I indeed got three rides on it that day. Here's CoasterForce's POV:



Rutschebanen (that just means Roller Coaster) is currently the second-oldest operating coaster in the world (since Lakemont's Leap-The-Dips has not been running lately and has an uncertain future). It is a side-friction coaster, that is, one that runs in a kind of trough with road wheels and side wheels that keep it centered on the track, but no upstop wheels keeping it from flying away. This is how log flumes still work during the drop, but full-fledged roller coasters with this mechanic are quite rare today. It has manually operated brakes worked by an operator who rides on the train, on a sort of jump seat at the head of the second car, with basically no restraint as far as I can tell. The operators participate in the lap bar inspection and then just jump on there and go.

The wildness of the ride you get depends on the brakeman's hand. I've heard stories of night rides where they let loose and allow tremendous ejector air. I did get some little airtime pops on my rides, but I wonder if these ejector tales are somewhat embellished, simply because it's hard for me to imagine how that would work. Since not ALL of the train is experiencing negative g-force at the same time, I can see how there could be such a thing without upstop wheels, but I don't get how the brakeman doesn't fly off--they don't have the loose lap bars that the riders have. Maybe they just hang on tight. It's a special job requiring a lot of training. They do wear hearing protection against the noise of the ride all day long.

The ride does provide powerful lateral forces on the turns, particularly in the dark section toward the end, which made me think of Space Mountain though this ride is 60 years older than Space Mountain.

This is a coaster that was partly blown up by Nazi saboteurs during World War II to break the morale of the Danish people--and was, according to the ACE plaque at least, prioritized for reconstruction in the midst of wartime to preserve said morale. That's how important this thing is. And, yes, I can see it.

The park's highest-thrill coaster, Dæmonen, didn't get running until the late afternoon, when I took a ride on it. It's a remarkably miniaturized B&M floorless looper with three inversions, shot here by Attraction Source:



You get fantastic views of downtown Copenhagen from this coaster, which is probably why it opens not with a big drop but with a turn and helix off the lift hill (kind of like Hersheypark's Great Bear). There's a modest drop into the vertical loop, then an Immelmann and a roll, and that's basically it. It's got some good positive g-force and whip to it; I'd rate it below SFNE's Batman: The Dark Knight for thrills, but that's not really the point here; the remarkable thing is just that they managed to fit it into Tivoli Gardens. It's a decent ride in a wonderful setting.

This was the one ride where I had to wait in a substantial line, probably in part because it opened so late, but it also has some capacity and operations issues that I think are caused by the site constraints. Riders exiting Dæmonen have to leave the station on the same side they came in (possibly after retrieving their stashed goods from the bins on the far side), which creates some crowd-flow issues. The ops have to tell entering riders to stay put for a few seconds after the air gates open, to give the previous riders a better opportunity to clear the area. I don't quite understand why the air gates can't just open later, but that's what I saw happening. I guess it's designed so that the exit gate can't open earlier.

That domed building you can see from the top of the lift is Ny Carlsberg Glyptoteket, an art museum housing the collection of brewery heir Carl Jacobsen, a 19th-century gentleman with a highly focused obsession with classical statuary (particularly Roman) and anything resembling classical statuary. There's a spot in there, among the crumbled statues of gods, emperors and hippopotami, where you can distinctly hear screams coming through the wall of people riding Daemonen. I think it adds something to the tableau.