Six Flags Over Texas

USA 2014 Blog Day 12

Firstly: Happy Fathers Day Dad! Hope you had a fantastic day and it was great to speak to you and Mum on Skype this morning.

Phew...what a scorcher! We were in Arlington, Fort Worth, Texas today and boy was it hot. We arrived at the park nice and early at 9am ready for the 10am opening, only to find that the park had just opened and were letting us in an hour early - what an unexpected bonus! We dashed straight over to the New Texas Giant as we were eager to ride having ridden this coaster on many occasions prior to its re-modelling. We had 2 consecutive goes, one in the front and one in the back as they were allowing you to stay on and re-ride. Verdict: disappointingly slower than expected. We appreciated that it was early morning and hadn’t warmed up so decided to wait until later in the day to ride again before passing judgement.

Next was Titan their 255 foot steel coaster which was running as good as ever so had 3 rides. The park was very quiet during the morning so by lunchtime had done a majority of the rides including the Texas SkyScreamer – the world’s tallest swing ride at 400 feet (although not convinced?). As we knew the weather was going to be hot today we wore our swimming shorts and pool shoes in order to hit the water rides to get wet and cool down. We managed to get on El Aserradero (Log Flume) twice to ride both sides of the flume but didn’t get very wet, so headed to the Roaring Rapids only to find they were closed. The ride reliability at this park isn’t great as the Rapids (along with other rides) were closed the last time we were here.

Today, the Observation Tower and Rapids were both closed all day, and both Superman Power of Terror and the Texas SkyScreamer were open for a couple of hours in morning then closed for the rest of the day. Noticeably the ride operators were slow at despatching trains on every ride and therefore the queues in the afternoon became very long. The new Texas Giant was only despatching 12 trains per hour / 285 riders. We did try the Giant again towards the end of the day and it was running a little faster, although it has lost it’s out of control sprint to the brake run as it had before it’s re-build.

Riding the new Texas Giant and Outlaw Run at Silver Dollar City only a couple of days apart shows how quickly the newly formed Rocky Mountain Coasters have progressed in design capability since re-modelling the Texas Giant about 4 years ago. Although we still really enjoyed the day and still a good collection of rides, the park now seems to lack the headline signature attraction that would tempt us back in the near future.

---