Where does the 85mph speed claim for The Big One at Blackpool Pleasure Beach come from?

[Matt N]

Hi guys. Sorry to bother you all, but I have a question; out of interest, where did Blackpool's 85mph speed claim for the Big One come from?

I only ask because it seems very high for a drop of 205ft like RCDB states the Big One's is; I did some SUVAT calculations, and when applying v2 = u2 + 2as to the problem (For those of you who don't know about SUVAT, v = Final Velocity, u = Initial Velocity, a = Acceleration and s = Displacement), I calculated that the highest speed it could possibly hit is around 78.6mph (if my SUVAT calculations and unit conversions are correct), and that is before factoring in real world factors like air resistance, angle of descent and the turning motion of the drop (SUVAT never factors in air resistance and assumes a straight freefall, so this result is effectively the terminal velocity of an object falling straight down from 205ft in the air with no air resistance whatsoever). For clarity, I set u to the lift speed of 6mph I once heard quoted (converted to m/s; 2.6822m/s, in case you're wondering), a to the known value of gravity 9.81m/s2, and s to 62.484m (205ft in metres).

I could well have gotten my calculations wrong, but I'll admit I am racking my brains slightly as to how Blackpool got the extra 6.4mph... if my calculations are correct, the ride would have to be falling at least 73.233m (240.2ft) under its own weight or would have to start from an initial velocity of 14.762m/s (33mph) on the existing drop to hit 85mph even under SUVAT, which assumes no air resistance and doesn't factor in things like angle of descent etc... I know the Big One doesn't go underground (a 240.2ft drop from a height of 235ft would require some kind of trench or tunnel, which the Big One doesn't have), and while I don't know for sure, I'm also guessing that the lift hill speed is nowhere near 33mph; that would border on a launched lift!

Does anyone know any more? I know the 235ft height claim is said to be derived from the ride's height above sea level, but I've never heard anything about where 85mph came from. However, everything official, including the ride's design team, says nothing but 85mph for the Big One's speed and 235ft for the Big One's height. I'm also a little stumped as to where RCDB got 213ft height, 205ft drop and 74mph from, as I've never heard these stats anywhere else (everything else says 235ft, 85mph; the only stat Blackpool seemingly concurs with RCDB on is the length of 5,497ft), but I'll admit that 74mph does seem more logical than 85mph given RCDB's claimed stats.

I guess I could just have gotten my SUVAT calculations wrong, but I'll admit that it is confusing me...

 

[Hixee]

So your numbers (and use of SUVAT) are correct.

It seems most likely to me that someone just plugged some basic numbers in (u=6mph, a=10m/s/s, s=235ft) and arrived at 85mph.

Just because it comes from an official source, doesn't mean it's actually accurate.

 

[Matt N]

So your numbers (and use of SUVAT) are correct.

It seems most likely to me that someone just plugged some basic numbers in (u=6mph, a=10m/s/s, s=235ft) and arrived at 85mph.

Just because it comes from an official source, doesn't mean it's actually accurate.

Having tried it again with acceleration changed to 10m/s2 and height changed to 72m (around 235ft), I think you may be right, as the result for v came to a near perfect 85mph! So maybe my degree of precision was just a little too high…

I’ll admit I am a little stumped as to where RCDB got their stats from, though; I know the 235ft height claim is often said to be from sea level, but I’ve literally never heard anything else besides 235ft apart from the 213ft claim on RCDB. Ditto with 85mph; apart from RCDB’s 74mph claim, I’ve never heard anything besides 85mph. Did Ron Toomer reveal these stats separately or something?

 

[Nitefly]

I can’t vouch for the exact speed at the bottom of the first drop, but the rate at which enjoyment descends from the highest point of the ride is certainly “very fast” (with the only thing known to be quicker being an unnecessary apology from @Matt N).

 

[Hixee]

I’ll admit I am a little stumped as to where RCDB got their stats from, though; I know the 235ft height claim is often said to be from sea level, but I’ve literally never heard anything else besides 235ft apart from the 213ft claim on RCDB. Ditto with 85mph; apart from RCDB’s 74mph claim, I’ve never heard anything besides 85mph. Did Ron Toomer reveal these stats separately or something?

Truthfully, no idea.

Best guess?

235ft, 85mph = Park's "public" stats - probably a bit of artistic licence on just how accurate those numbers are.
213ft, 74mph = Either Duane talking to the park engineers, PBE, or Ron/Arrow directly and getting better numbers. Duane is very well connected, as are the guys at PBE, so it seems likely to me that they have gotten hold of better numbers from somewhere.

 

[Coasterotter]

Whilst this may not answer the question of where BPB got the stat for the Big One reaching a top speed of 85mph, At the 20 minute and 30 second mark in this video showcasing a corporate press kit from Arrow, it's shown that the Big One (at least in 1994, when the specific part of the press kit seems to be from) has a drop of 205ft, hit 3.65g and apparently reached a top speed of 74.5mph which is closer to the stats RCDB says the Big One has than BPB's stats not factoring in any modifications made to the track after the ride opened.:

(Source: Arrow Enlightenment Leader).

I hope that at least a gives an answer to the question of what was the top speed of the Big One in 1994 before any modifications were made to the ride.

 

[HeartlineCoaster]

The maths can't lie, but I've always grown up hearing 'the fast train with a good tailwind is quicker than Stealth.'
I guess there are marketing advantages in taking all time top speed over average top speed in certain instances.

 

[Furiustobaco]

Due to BPB's sea level claim i do doubt that top speed. In RCT maybe, in real life, no.

 

[Robbie]

I thought the Big One was 235ft above sea level, but the actual park (and therefore the Big One's base) is itself 20ft above sea level, which is why you get the discrepancy. Sea level: 235ft, actual height from the floor of BPB: 213ft.

 

[Niles]

I'm imagining Pleasure Beach just asked their local speed watch to check how fast it goes, Pleasure Beach did not know however they bumped up the number so they can count it as excessive speeding.

 

[JoshC.]

It's also worth having some historical context.

When Big One was built, it became the tallest roller coaster in the world. But it wasn't the one with the longest drop - that record was still held by Steel Phantom at Kennywood, which was also pushed as the world's fastest roller coaster, hitting a familiar sounding top speed of...85mph.

I wonder if part of it was just a marketing spin. You have the world's tallest roller coaster in a time when launch roller coasters were in their infancy, and certainly weren't hitting 80+mph. It makes sense to advertise it as, at the very least, being capable of hitting the same speed as the world's fastest roller coaster. Even if they just say once in the small print 'A maximum speed of 85mph can be achieved', that makes it make sense.

I'm not saying that's 100% what happened, but certainly feels plausible to me.

Ultimately it's all just marketing jargon. And even then, given you only hit the top speed for a small moment of time, no one is going to know the difference between 74mph and 85mph either.

 

[furie]

It's sooooo tall that there's no air resistance up there, you need to recalculate using the stats for a Virgin Space flight

 

[Pokemaniac]

no one is going to know the difference between 74mph and 85mph either.

I've done extensive calculations on the subject and found that it is quite close to 11 mph.

How fast that is, though, is impossible to know. Mileses and footsies and such make no sense to me.

 

[Hixee]

I've done excessive calculations on the subject and found that it is quite close to 11 mph.

Glad to see that PhD is proving useful already.

 

[Sandman]

Ultimately it's all just marketing jargon.

BPB have always been good at bending the truth, stats wise.

I vaguely recall an announcement in the Infusion station that proclaimed riders would feel up to 38g (or something close to that). Never quite figured out if it was just a straight up bold lie or a sloppy mistake. Either way they played it for years.

 

[Pokemaniac]

I vaguely recall an announcement in the Infusion station that proclaimed riders would feel up to 38g (or something close to that). Never quite figured out if it was just a straight up bold lie or a sloppy mistake. Either way they played it for years.

It could theoretically be true, it would just be sustained only for extremely short durations (milliseconds if not microseconds). Impacts are very high-G events, technically speaking. Clapping your hands subjects your fingers to hundreds of g for a very short while, while the acceleration of a finger when snapping can reach a thousand g or so. The jolting of an SLC could probably reach tiny peaks of 38 g in a particularly rough corner, but it would just come out as a spike on the accelerometer graph that should be deleted as noise.

 

[Hixee]

It could theoretically be true, it would just be sustained only for extremely short durations (milliseconds if not microseconds). Impacts are very high-G events, technically speaking. Clapping your hands subjects your fingers to hundreds of g for a very short while, while the acceleration of a finger when snapping can reach a thousand g or so. The jolting of an SLC could probably reach tiny peaks of 38 g in a particularly rough corner, but it would just come out as a spike on the accelerometer graph that should be deleted as noise.

@Trax or @Benni - either of you able to give us the highest "unfiltered" g-force reading you've ever recorded?

My Masters project was related to real-time displacement calculations from recorded acceleration data, it was easily to have vibrations in the machinery exceed many dozens of Gs for tiny fractions of a second, but not useful for most 'macro' scale engineering stuff.

 

[Trax]

@Trax or @Benni - either of you able to give us the highest "unfiltered" g-force reading you've ever recorded?

Getting a completely unfiltered measurement is not as easy as you might think.
Your body works as a dampener, so using a chestmount weakens the reading, but is more realistic to what the force actually feels like. Mounting the accelerometer will obviously yield the highest readings, but the measurement will not reflect what happens to your body.
So it appears, that our dummies might combine the best of the 2 methods, with little to no dampening due to its stiffness, but still withouth the direct connection to the train.
In addition, our new accelerometer directly applies a filtering while recording, which is meant to get rid of the highest, short time, peaks experienced during the ride. This is actually a requirement in the DIN E / ASTM standards.

All of this is not an issue for our normal videos, as the processing we apply will smooth out the different peaks. Luckily, this smoothing is required to comply with the regulations, so usually, we do not have to think about this.

So, to answer your question reliably, we can only refer to measurements made with our old accelerometer, which capped out at 16g, which we hit on our mounted onrides of Thunderbird and Troy.
With a chest mount, the highest recording I could find was 7,5g on a steel rollercoaster and 9g on a Woodie.

Please keep in mind that those a just short-term peaks, and do not reflect the forces the ride was designed for.

 

[Hixee]

All very logical and clearly explained - thanks @Trax.

So, to answer your question reliably, we can only refer to measurements made with our old accelerometer, which capped out at 16g, which we hit on our mounted onrides of Thunderbird and Troy.
With a chest mount, the highest recording I could find was 7,5g on a steel rollercoaster and 9g on a Woodie.

Please keep in mind that those a just short-term peaks, and do not reflect the forces the ride was designed for.

This basically says it all though - vibration/impact based Gs are very, very different to the "designed" forces the ride exerts.

 

[Matt N]

Thank you all for your in-depth answers; they're much appreciated!

However, I'd just like to highlight @Coasterotter's post for a second:

Whilst this may not answer the question of where BPB got the stat for the Big One reaching a top speed of 85mph, At the 20 minute and 30 second mark in this video showcasing a corporate press kit from Arrow, it's shown that the Big One (at least in 1994, when the specific part of the press kit seems to be from) has a drop of 205ft, hit 3.65g and apparently reached a top speed of 74.5mph which is closer to the stats RCDB says the Big One has than BPB's stats not factoring in any modifications made to the track after the ride opened.:

(Source: Arrow Enlightenment Leader).

I hope that at least a gives an answer to the question of what was the top speed of the Big One in 1994 before any modifications were made to the ride.

If you look at the embedded video and go to the start of the Big One section (about 20 minutes in), Arrow embeds a full set of stats for the ride. One very interesting piece of info I found in there was that as well as the stats Coasterotter posted, Arrow claims the ride's lift height to be 201ft as opposed to the often quoted (as an alternative to Blackpool's 235ft claim) 213ft, with the drop being 205ft as previously stated.

While I'm admittedly unsure how the drop is larger than the height (Big One doesn't go underground at all), I'm unsure why Arrow would claim the ride to be shorter than it actually was, so surely this is likely to be an accurate figure?

With that in mind, an interesting thought dawned upon me; if the Big One is 201ft tall as this press pack claims, doesn't that mean that the Big One never technically held the world height record in the first place, as Magnum is 205ft tall, and doesn't that also mean that its UK height record was technically stolen by Stealth in 2006 instead of by Exodus in 2024 (if it happens)?

It could be that Arrow is measuring the lift height by a different metric, however; maybe they're talking about the amount of lift hill track, for instance. I don't really know... does anyone have any thoughts here? Surely Arrow are a pretty trustworthy source for the Big One's stats, aren't they, especially given that they claim it to be 12ft shorter than RCDB's listing here?