Backyard Roller Coasters (opens in new tab)

If you haven't seen it yet, Tim over at the Way Out West Blow-In Blog[1] has been building a cartway to do farm work where a tractor wouldn't serve the purpose well. I haven't watched recently but last I checked he had built a wagon or two and a boom-mounted trenching wheel. It looked like a neat project!

[1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSViWfOV4pEcYnzpV6w548Q

There's some backstory there, and some photos, and links to other things like https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCogxwyWHLKCTnBXRGQXbnYg. I think it's ok. It's a hell of a topic after all, and better yet, seems to pass the "can't be predicted from any pre-existing sequence" test, which is the gold standard for HN topics.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

HN allows sales links to subscription-only services from tech startups, I'm not sure why a book would be off-limits

"Subsequent inversions or another run of the coaster would serve as insurance against unintentional survival of more robust passengers." - This sentence just cracks me up

I wish I had a backyard big enough for a Euthanasia Coaster!

There was a coaster at King's Dominion in Virginia called Rebel Yell (since renamed Racer 75) that ran backwards on one of the 2 tracks from 1992 to 2008. I remember it being fun but I preferred the forward facing ride.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racer_75

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adES4jZpAHk

There's a surprising amount of coasters that run backwards nowadays! You have a handful of wooden coasters that generally run (or did run) backwards as part of a Halloween event (Racer 75, Thunder Road (RIP), Racer at Kings Island and Viper at Six Flags Great America) but a lot of modern steel coasters actually do it by design. Like Hagrid's Magical Creatures Motorbike Adventure at Islands of Adventure in Orlando has a decently lengthy backwards section (plus some other surprises I won't spoil) or Mr Freeze at both Six Flags Over Texas or Six Flags St Louis both go through their courses both forwards and back. And that's not even counting Boomerangs like Bat at Canada's Wonderland that another sibling commenter mentioned

(PS glad to see my favorite hobby being mentioned on HN, I could literally talk about this stuff all day)

Carowinds, in the Charlote NC area, had a design based on the Rebel Yell / Racer 75 called Thunder Road. two tracks mirrored each other and one side ran the train backwards.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunder_Road_(roller_coaster)

It was a tough call between riding in the last car on the forwards side or anywhere on the backwards side, but on slower days when everyone was standing in line for the stand-up coasters, you didn't have to choose. Those were good summers.

Canada's Wonderland has a forward-and-back ride called The Bat:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_UF0ozd2ns

The real issue with it is that capacity is severely limited since you can only have the one train. So there's none of the usual 3-train flow where one is always loading, one's climbing, and one's waiting to load.