Specific Type: Mega Coaster
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At a park by the name of Six Flags over Texas in May of 1990, a wooden scream machine called the Texas Giant debuted as the world's tallest wood-tracked coaster and blew away the competition to become a world-renown ride. Ten years later, the race for height and speed sped along among parks opening up new steel coaster creations, with theme parks around the planet rolling out new steel coasters pushing 200 feet on a yearly basis. They say that everything is bigger in Texas, and roller coasters just weren't going to be an exception. On April 27, 2001, Six Flags over Texas would once again define extreme when the Arlington-based park once more unleashed a coaster to go down as one of the world's tallest and fastest. Titan, a mammoth 245-foot-tall hyper-twister of a ride, towers over the Texas Giant by over 100 feet, with bright orange tracks climbing to the sky and plunging down over 25 stories. The Titan comes from Switzerland's Giovanola as a successor to the company's initial steel hypercoaster - the California-based Six Flags Magic Mountain's Goliath. A modified version of the west coast ride, Titan exceeds Goliath for both height and length, with an additional 360-degrees of helix rotation and an extra 812 feet of vertical altitude. Loading onto the 2-abreast sit-down train, riders secure lap restraints and leave the station with a 180-degree bend around to the lift-hill. Engaging on the chain, the train is towed up to a Titanic height of 230 feet above the Texas turf - nearly twice the height of the once-mightyTexas Giant. The first drop begins and quickly takes riders down a 61-degree plunge into a fog-enshrouded tunnel two-hundred and fifty-five feet below the peak. Blasting out of the tunnel with 85 miles per hour in the train's favor, the orange track leads back up with a steep second climb to the sky. The course heads around for the second turn, then riders dive down the second 186-foot long drop bottoming out over the first tunnel. A camel back hump sends the train up and passengers airborne with a crest serving up their fill of airtime. Titan's upwards double helix spirals the train around and gets the train up on a mid-course block brake section paralleling the lift-hill, but the lack of speed doesn't last for long. Diving around a left-handed U-turn, Titanpicks up the speed again and rounds a banked curve ending in a dive back down. The ride's centerpiece feature is next - the high-speed, high-g double downward helix serving up 4.5 g's of positive force on the way around. Ending the double helix, a direction-changing Carousel Curve twists the course around to thread back through the center of the helix and finally the track banks around a last 180-degree turn climbing back up to the station level. |
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