I think the reason why Arrow didn’t do the same axle design on the hyper coasters as they did on the looping coasters was because when they designed Magnum XL-200, their initial hyper coaster, they essentially upscaled the company’s mine train design and used that as a template to design the hyper coaster with.
For all intents and purposes, Arrow hyper coasters are essentially just massively upscaled Arrow mine trains, from a technical standpoint. That’s why the hypers have the 3-row cars as opposed to the 2-row cars that a lot of Arrow’s later (relatively speaking) coasters had.
Yeah, I think mine-train -> Magnum is essentially correct, with a couple of evolutionary steps along the way.
First in 1972, you had Astroworld's Excalibur, which literally was a mine-train, but scaled way up to nearly 90' tall and with 100% steel supports in lieu of the more typical wood support structures seen on most arrow mine-trains.
And then in 1978, along came CP's somewhat odd-ball Gemini, which is based on mine train systems, but with a layout and elements more in line with traditional wood coasters (just as with most of the hypers), and scaled all the way up to 125' (a near world record at the time).
There is also Valleyfair's Excalibur, which is another wood structure/larger-scaled/more traditional layout odd-ball that blurs the lines a bit, like Gemini, but it opened in '89, the same year as Magnum, so not really an evolutionary predecessor.
Anyway, on topic, I've never had the opportunity to ride Big One, but it's nice to see Blackpool continue to invest in their old Arrow hyper to help improve it and keep it around a while longer. (Full disclosure, I'm a huge Magnum and Phantom's Revenge fan, so big old arrow hypers will always have a soft spot in my heart, even if time and technology have passed them by).
