Dorney Park

I hadn't really heard too much of Dorney Park until they opened Hydra last year. I didn't think it had any world class rides, being one of those parks in the Cedar Park chain that hid under the shadow of it's bigger Ohio brother. I was going to be proved wrong however.

Being the first Cedar Fair park it was time to buy the second season pass of the trip. This one would get us into Geauga Lake and Cedar Fair later on. Once again we had a head start on the public being allowed to ride Hydra before the park opened. Apparently a "Dorney" is a place frequented by bees, but it was bigger beasts we were hoping to encounter today.

Hydra stands on the site that used to belong to Hercules a large wooden coaster that divided opinion of those who had ridden it. The new ride is a floorless model, the third of the trip but unlike the other two this had a very unique layout using the side of the hill on which it was built really well.

It is perhaps most famous for it's Jo-Jo roll, a barrel roll that you go through immediately having left the station and before the lift hill. This is a very strange element and does feel really odd taking it at the slow speed that you do. The ride is actually really decent and I liked it a lot. It did pick up speed during the day apparently although I didn't go back to it once the ERS was over.

This was the most popular coaster in the park with the public even though there was a larger one just behind it.

Steel Force has been open for some time and is similar to Steel Dragon, a coaster in Japan that had been closed and we could only look at when we visited there in 2005. On this occasion we could ride it and I really liked this ride. Looking at it, it reminded me of the Big One at Blackpool which is a horrible ride. This however was really smooth and once I realised I didn't have to brace at the bottom of the drops I had plenty of goes on this one and enjoyed it a lot. Oh, and thanks to the park for giving us an ERS on this one immediately after Hydra.

Following the demise of Hercules, Thunderhead is the park's remaining wooden coaster. I thought it was alright but I think this was the first coaster on the trip to claim an injury within the club. I think someone injured a rib, and another came off complaining of headaches. Odd Arne seems to think its alright, but this before the train left.

Steel Force is a German made coaster that is great and I was quickly realising that this park was very understated and had a really good selection of rides, they were showing me that faster and higher doesn't necessarily mean better.

One thing that scared me a bit about this ride is that the exit bridge comes extremely close to the passing train as I think you can see here.

The park also has a mouse coaster but it is a little temperamental on the day we were there. I think it broke down 3 times, the last time with our club members on it when they should have been making their way back to the coaches. As such, not everyone got to ride it.

When I was queueing up for the mouse ride being the attention freak that I am, I noticed something peculiar with this ride that a lot of people may have missed. Some of the cars were themed to be cats and the other were all mice. This made the idea of the mouse coaster a lot more fun because you now had some cars chasing all the others. I hadn't seen this being done anywhere else. Admittedly in this pic you have a cat chasing a cat.

Now for the highlight of the day Talon, the park's inverted coaster. This ride was great and a lot of fun, once you found the entrance that was.

Plenty of Gs, a unique layout and an excellently paced second half made sure that when I came to rank the coasters at the end of the year, this one would be well up the list.

The park had also thought about photo opportunities. Here rather by accident, I got a couple of other club members going through the helix.


Dorney Park surprised me, I thought it would be an average park at best but I hadn't appreciated Talon or Steel Force and how good they would come to be. It's a shame that we left this park as early as we did, we could easily have spent the rest of the day there and not have been bored. However we had another surprise location to hit next; one that would divide the group...

Lets go to PTC